Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Primary health care is a major component of Canada's health care system, covering the principal medical needs of the entire population. Decisions made by family doctors, care providers and health policy makers are informed and safeguarded by evidence from research. Research practice in the field, however, is far from being optimal as it underutilizes emerging innovative methods and sources of knowledge. Establishing new ways of learning from health and medical data for researchers, doctors, health authorities and patients is a key step to improve primary care on all levels. By employing modern statistical methods, my objective is to develop accessible and user-friendly Bayesian web-applications that will improve questionnaire validation and the use of small-sample-sized data in primary care. I will develop, implement and test the web-applications together with primary care researchers (the future users) and patients (the future research participants). The work is done under the methodological development platform of Quebec Support for People and Patient-Oriented Research and Trials Units. Ultimately, better research practice will translate into higher quality of evidence-based care, improved patient outcomes and increased cost-efficiency of our health-care system.