Ibukun Abejirinde, MD, MSC., PHD

In the last decade, digital health, including virtual care has been recognised as playing a crucial role in healthcare delivery, with adoption and investments accelerating exponentially. But how do these technologies enable responsive and resilient health systems? What should be done to effectively translate evidence in this rapidly evolving domain from theory and scientific niches into policy and clinical practice? How can implementers and healthcare decision makers adapt lessons from other contexts to align with their own realities and be positioned to scale sustainably? As an implementation and evaluation researcher with a background in clinical medicine, these are some of the questions Dr. Ibukun Abejirinde seeks to answer.

Beyond what is often considered rhetoric of the magical promise that digital technologies hold, Abejirinde believes it is necessary to better understand their implications for quality and continuity of care especially for underserved groups. Her previous research applied realist methodology and critical inquiry to inform the use of clinical decision support systems in addressing access and quality of maternal care in low-resource settings. Her transdisciplinary approach is located at the nexus of systems thinking, theory-driven inquiry and implementation science.

By answering questions on “what works, for whom, in which contexts, how and why?” Dr. Abejirinde’s research program focuses on understanding and enabling the role of digital technologies in the ecosystem of health system strengthening in Canada as well as in low- and middle-income countries. Leveraging her networks and expertise in global health, she collaborates with colleagues and organisations globally to push the boundaries of research and learning on digital health systems.

Dr. Abejirinde is leading the development of a pan-Canadian framework for digital health evaluations at the Canadian Network for Digital Health Evaluation (CNDHE). Accompanied by an interactive toolkit, the aim is to inform a standardized approach to evaluating a wide array of digital health interventions with a health equity focus and the Quadruple aims as core health impact outcomes. It is expected that this product suite will be adapted and tested as a quality improvement strategy in different Canadian contexts, and will evolve as its application becomes widespread.