O'Brien Institute 2025 Learning Health System Catalyst Awardees

The O'Brien Institute is pleased to announce the winners of our 2025 Learning Health System (LHS) catalyst competition. This award provided funding for six projects that align with the Institute's Better Healthcare goal and were deemed likely to leverage external funding and lead to societal impacts. We were pleased to extend the reach of this catalyst competition by partnering with six Cumming School of Medicine academic departments and the Sex, Gender and Women's Health Research Hub, all of which offered co-funding for projects that also support their strategic priorities.

Learn about the winners and their projects below.

Dr. Gina Dimitropoulos, PhD

Youth knowledge in action: Embedding youth voices in Alberta’s learning health system

This project aims to build youth capacity in knowledge translation through a Youth Knowledge Ambassador Training (KAT) Program that will train participants to translate research into clear, creative outputs for peers, providers, policymakers, and the public.

Dr. Jessalyn Holodinsky, PhD

Emergency department surge forecasting for climate-related health events: Building predictive infrastructure for health system resilience

This project aims to establish the foundational data linkages and develop baseline predictive models necessary for emergency department surge forecasting during climate-related events.

Dr. Daniel Niven, MD, PhD

Augmented admit: A multidisciplinary initiative to reduce inpatient burden on the Emergency Department

Co-funded by the Department of Critical Care Medicine

This project aims to capture and refine data to inform intensive care unit (ICU) providers which patient populations will benefit from an Augmented Admit and establish criteria for consideration of a collaborative admission between ICU and internal medicine to the newly funded critical care beds in the cardiac care unit.

Dr. Johanna Ospel, MD, PhD

Real world treatment and trial participation of patients with acute medium vessel occlusion stroke: The REAL-MeVO study

Co-funded by the Department of Clinical Neurosciences

This project aims to quantify the number of medium vessel occlusion (MeVO) endovascular treatments that were performed in Alberta within and outside the ESCAPE-MeVO trial, to assess how patients enrolled in the trial differed from those not enrolled, and to identify patient demographic, socio-economic & geographic factors associated with trial enrolment.

Dr. Amity Quinn, PhD

Cervix self-sampling through community pharmacies: A new model of care to expand access and system capacity

Co-funded by the Sex, Gender and Women's Health Research Hub

This project aims to catalyze a pragmatic trial to investigate a novel approach to Human papillomavirus (HPV) screening in partnership with community pharmacies, increasing equitable access to cancer screening, expanding the role of pharmacy within public health systems and, in turn, improving public health system capacity.

Dr. Tracie Risling, PhD

United we stand: Advancing public health through collaborative action on misinformation

This project aims to engage a transdisciplinary group of scientists, public healthcare practitioners and other clinicians, science communicators, arts organizations, media experts, students, and members of the public in a networking and knowledge exchange event as a kick-off to a year of extended outreach activities meant to address the rapidly escalating challenge of misinformation on public health and wellness.

Congratulations to all our awardees! We look forward to seeing the impact of your projects in advancing public health.