O'Brien Institute Learning Health System Catalyst Awardees

The O'Brien Institute is pleased to announce the winners of our Learning Health System (LHS) catalyst competition. Funding was awarded to seven 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 five Cumming School of Medicine academic departments, who provided co-funding for projects that also support their strategic priorities.

Learn about the winners and their projects below.

Dr. Selena Au, MD 

Improving care in the ICU through a physician practice metrics dashboard and QI rounds: Co-design and implementation

Co-funded by the Department of Critical Care Medicine

This project aims to resolve issues of gaps in using clinical data to develop and sustainably display QI metrics to drive continuous care improvement, particularly at the provider-specific level.

Dr. Claire Barber, MD, PhD

Optimizing rheumatology triage: A learning health system approach

Co-funded by the Department of Medicine

This project aims to conduct the necessary preparatory work to support the collection of patient-reported data to support rheumatology triage in Calgary.

Dr. Kathryn Birnie, PhD 

Co-design of an implementation guide for a new national health standard for pediatric pain management

This project aims to codevelop a PedPM Standard Implementation Guide for children’s, community/regional, and rehabilitation hospitals with relevant knowledge users, including youth and families with lived experience, multidisciplinary health professionals, and organizational leaders across Canada.

Dr. Kathryn Crowder, MD

Machine learning-driven solution for deep vein thrombosis diagnosis in emergency department settings

Co-funded by the Department of Emergency Medicine

The objectives of this project are to design and develop a patient information reporting platform for clinicians to reduce documentation burden, assess multi-modal pre-trained generalized AI models for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) diagnostic algorithmic approach, and to develop methods to measure the effectiveness of this user-centered AI-enabled Decision Support System software solution for DVT diagnosis. 

Dr. Stephanie Garies, PhD

Patient complexity index for use in primary care

Co-funded by the Department of Family Medicine

The overall goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive primary care patient complexity indicator, combining four aspects of complexity (medical complexity, social complexity, utilization, and mental health visits) into a composite measure.

Dr. Jessalyn Holodinsky, PhD

Creating a feedback based LHS in the ED

Co-funded by the Department of Community Health Sciences

The focus of this project is to understand what information (e.g., outcomes of the ED visit, procedures performed) referring providers require to reflect and evaluate their decision to direct patients to the ED and develop a measure to identify when a patient is directed to the ED by another healthcare provider.

Dr. Sachin Pendharkar, MD

Improving obstructive sleep apnea care in Alberta: Refinement of a primary care clinical pathway

Co-funded by the Department of Medicine

The project will build from prior research and refine a clinical pathway that supports person-centred obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) management by primary care physicians in Calgary.

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