COPD as a Risk Factor in Primary Care: A Canadian Retrospective Cohort Study

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a complex disease that is predicted to be the third most common cause of death by 2030. In Canada, the care and management of chronic conditions is largely provided by primary care providers. Although there is emerging research and initiatives that describe the prevalence of COPD in Canadian primary care settings, to our knowledge, there have been no efforts to use a large pan-Canadian database to analyze COPD as a risk factor for other common chronic conditions managed in primary care. Since 2009, the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network has assembled Canada's first national electronic health record (EHR) data repository for primary care research and surveillance; it consists of ten primary care research networks with over 1,300 participating primary care sentinel clinicians (family physicians and nurse practitioners) contributing quarterly data on more than 1,700,000 patients across eight provinces and territories. This study will report the results of a series of descriptive and survival analyses compare an exposure of COPD in people over 40 years old (N=22,942) to predict the outcomes of: heart failure, depression, anxiety, coronary artery disease, diabetes, anemia, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, underweight, and osteoporosis while controlling for EHR status of: smoking, age, sex, and rurality. Results will be computed in March 2019. By the date of the ERS Congress 2019, we will be able to report the results of the aforementioned analyses, which will demonstrate the utility of using large EMR datasets to illustrate comorbid temporality managed by Canadian primary care providers.