Grant: Health System Impact Fellowships - PostDoc Central Canada 2 year

Health information technology have a tremendous potential to improve the quality and efficiency of our healthcare system. Despite the potential benefits, there are many policy and practical challenges to implementing health information technology. Several experts and research studies suggest that engaging patients throughout the development and implementation of health information technology is critical in ensuring its success. The purpose of this project is to develop a toolkit to guide healthcare organizations in developing and integrating patient engagement activities in their health information technology implementations. This project will be conducted in three stages. The first stage will focus on understanding the the dynamics of engaging patients through a survey and interviews with patients and healthcare providers. Based on the findings of the first stage, a prototype toolkit will be developed in the second phase. The content of the toolkit will be validated by patient engagement experts. The toolkit will also be tested with patients and healthcare providers to determine its usability and ease of use. The prototype toolkit will applied to a patient portal implementation to understand how the toolkit will work and ways to improve it. The final product of this project is a finished toolkit for healthcare organizations to use in supporting their patient engagement plans when implementing health information technology.