Innovate Health Research:
Better Health Treatments
Health research data is essential for improving your health care experiences and health outcomes since it helps health researchers, planners, and policy-makers address gaps in care, discover new medicines, treatments, and products, improve and create health services, and evaluate and advance health policy for better care delivery.
Predictive Medicine
Challenge: Physicians experience severe burnout due to the daily grind of documenting massive amounts of health data, time they could be spending with their patients.
How data was used: GEMINI, a data collection and analysis study study co-led by Dr. Amol Verma and Dr. Fahad Razak at St. Michael's Hospital, sought to harness data from hospital electronic medical records (EMRs), including the rooms patients stayed in, the doctors who cared for them, and the tests, treatments, and medications they received.
Result: GEMINI helps clinicians access the right information to treat their patient at the right time and improves the quality of care delivered. GEMINI now receives data from 33 Ontario hospitals and provides customized feedback and insights to 600 physicians. It has become one of Canada’s largest digital health platforms for research.
Learn more here.
Public Engagement
Challenge: Traditionally, researcher/clinician-led research has been the standard for generating health and healthcare knowledge, although there are still gaps in the movement of knowledge and its use by those who need it. Over time, there has been a shift to recognize the increasing importance of public engagement that facilitates collaboration and the ability to contribute lived experience to enhance understanding of health issues.
How health data was used: The ICES Public Advisory Council (PAC) expressed interest in submitting a research question to ICES' Applied Health Research Question (AHRQ) Portfolio. The chosen research question developed by the PAC, “What was the most frequent cause for outpatient mental health visits (over time)?”, was answered using ICES data. The PAC was integrated to shape the direction of the study and ultimately oversee how the data will be distributed back to communities and the public directly.
Result: The PAC is planning to release public-facing and plain language summaries of the results to those who the data directly impacts in 2023. The full report and process of integrated knowledge translation with members of the public will also be co-created with the PAC to mobilize knowledge around these efforts.
Real-World Settings, Real World Solutions
Challenge: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard for studying the safety and efficacy of new or existing health interventions like drugs, devices, or technology. However, traditional RCTs test these interventions under optimal conditions, so the findings of these RCTs may not be true when these interventions are applied in usual care, in non-research settings, or to patients’ everyday lives.
How health data was used: A team led by ICES Western scientist, Dr. Merrick Zwarenstein, developed a tool for designing randomized trials that would be more pragmatic. The tool, PRECIS-2, guides trial designers in building randomized trials whose findings are more relevant to decision-makers. Using the tool helps ensure trials are designed so that their results are relevant to and used by patients, clinicians, and policymakers.
Result: Researchers have found a substantial benefit to conducting pragmatic trials using ICES databases. Instead of identifying and testing an intervention on a small sample of people with a particular condition, researchers can look at the data on everyone with the condition in Ontario and conduct the trial on all of them very cheaply because data collection costs are low. These pragmatic trials are both less expensive than traditional RCTs and more comprehensive.