Grant: Project Grant

There is an increasing role of technologies in clinical care settings for use by patients, clinicians and family members. Subsequently, there is a need to support implementation and integration into routine clinical care, despite there being a significant health human resource crisis/staffing challenges. Nurses, doctors and other health professionals do not have the capacity to support selection, use, and troubleshooting of these technologies, yet these technologies are now crucial to providing clinical care. The role of a digital navigator has started to appear in clinical care settings and some literature is present that describes the role, along with subsequent evaluations. There is a potential for these roles to address an important and new challenge in Canadian care environments, however many organizations are unaware of the digital navigator roles and responsibilities, funding sources, reporting structures and clinical care settings in which these individuals work. As well, its unclear what barriers and facilitators are present that may impact the uptake of these roles. There is a need to do some background work before implementing these roles in Canada at scale to be able to best assess their utility, and understand the best way that these roles can be leveraged/optimized.