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

Over the last several decades, innovative technologies have resulted in astonishing breakthroughs in healthcare that enhance patient outcomes and our healthcare system. The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) is developing an open innovation strategy with the goal of fostering and facilitating digital innovations both inside and outside the hospital. To support this strategy, TOH must use robust methods to evaluate and monitor the performance of various innovative initiatives. The primary goal of this fellowship is to develop the Ottawa Hospital Evaluation Toolkit to support innovation strategy evaluations at TOH. My work will consist of two phases. The first phase is to create a toolkit that allows stakeholders to identify feasible research designs to evaluate the implementation of a new strategy at TOH. The toolkit will allow stakeholders to identify the optimal method to use to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular innovation in a wide variety of scenarios. As part of this toolkit, I will develop recommendations for how to select the optimal design, how to determine the required sample size and how to analyse data for each design. I will also create a generic protocol and statistical analysis plan for each design that TOH can adopt in the future. In the second phase of my work, I will apply this evaluation toolkit to complete a case study. Lumenix, a third-party company is currently partnering with TOH to evaluate the Artificially Intelligent Monitoring System (AIMS) that promotes hand hygiene to reduce healthcare-associated infections, patient length of stay, and related costs. The case study will illustrate how to use the toolkit developed in the first phase to evaluate AIMS at TOH.