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

Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) were recently created to improve access to networks of health and social services that are tailored to their local communities and to promote more equitable population health outcomes. However, it remains unclear exactly how OHTs can collaboratively achieve this shared vision. One way is population health management (PHM). PHM is a set of processes for using health and social data to identify communities' needs, proactively plan services/policy, and act on health inequities. The purpose of this fellowship is to collaboratively lead stakeholders from three OHT organizations in implementing and evaluating the implementation of a novel PHM framework developed by Dr. Andrew Pinto and colleagues and championed by the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA). With the OHA, I will enact the impact goal of supporting PHM implementation across OHTs particularly by leveraging OHA's knowledge exchange, data collection, and novel data analytics infrastructure. The project will proceed in three phases starting with a review of scientific research on best-practices in PHM and seeking local perspectives on OHT-specific needs (e.g. financial, data, and organizational management) for sustainable PHM implementation. The implementation phase will use rapid improvement cycles to identify and apply the framework to each OHT's unique context, and develop data acquisition, management and reporting processes that can be embedded into OHA's novel data platform to measure health inequities. Six months post-implementation, we will conduct a mixed methods realist evaluation examining what factors influence to what extent the PHM framework is enacted and how PHM influences OHT data use, decision-making, and service design. Publicly-available research articles, data management and analysis manuals, and PHM implementation training materials will then be developed to help ensure PHM is safely and effectively used to assist all OHTs in realizing their vision.