Digital health combines technology like smartphones and artificial intelligence, data from personal devices and hospital systems, and people like doctors, nurses, patients, and families to improve the health and well-being of the population. Digital health improves access to care and quality by providing the right information at the right time. Our teamâs digital health research focuses on improving care for women, children, and their families in BC. There are existing successes and challenges to using digital health research in BC hospitals. To learn from these lessons and listen to the needs of our community, we will partner with people with lived experience (patients), healthcare workers, and hospital leaders. We aim to develop a shared research strategy and plan for a new Digital Health Research Centre spanning BC Childrenâs and Womenâs Hospitals. In this project, we will identify gaps and opportunities, define priorities and co-develop research strategies that address current challenges to improve our health system with digital technology. The partnerships we form will allow us to advance the digital health research field and better serve the needs of the BC childrenâs and womenâs health community.
Research Location: BC Children`s Hospital and Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children
Establishing a Patient/Family-Partner Hip Dysplasia Advisory Group
Together with the Iâm a HIPpy Foundation, our lab will hold a series of group discussions with patients with hip dysplasia, a common hip condition in children, and their parents/guardians. We want to learn about their experiences through their care journeys and what they wish they would have known prior to, and during, their own treatment. We will aim to involve patients and families who have had a variety of experiences and from across BC to ensure that their stories reflect the wide variety of care journeys. From these discussions, we will also aim to identify patients and families interested in working as partners with our research lab, the Hippy Lab, for our future research projects. This will help use to form a patient/family advisory group which will be a valuable resource for our lab. This group will work with us to decide on future research questions we want to answer to make sure that our projects are focused on patient-important concerns. They will also help us to create educational resources that will better inform patients and families of what to expect throughout diagnosis and treatment for hip dysplasia.