Noah Ivers, MD, PHD, CCFP

Within the healthcare system, clinicians often struggle with delivering the best evidence-based care to their patients within the limited available time and resources. As a family physician, Dr. Noah Ivers found himself frequently frustrated by the challenges of a system that seems sub-optimally organized and not patient-centred enough. Dr. Ivers conducts research that addresses this health gap by focusing on finding innovative approaches to ensure that patients reliably get the right treatment in the right way at the right time.

Dr. Ivers is acknowledged as a world leader in providing performance measurement and feedback to clinicians to support quality improvement. He works with stakeholders across the province and around the world to find ways to measure and report quality of care in ways that enable providers to respond more effectively to care gaps.

Dr. Ivers is currently leading a new program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support the evaluation of feedback given to thousands of Ontario physicians. In this project, Dr. Ivers and his team will evaluate different strategies to address the current opioid crisis by giving doctors more support to safely manage high-risk prescriptions while also testing different approaches to improve patient outcomes. The project also involves working with partners to design new initiatives aimed at improving antibiotic prescribing to prevent another emerging public health crisis of antimicrobial resistance. The project will give doctors a clear sense of how their prescribing habits compare to the ideal and provide tools and resources to improve them.

In related CIHR-funded research, Dr. Ivers uses data to automatically produce personalized recommendations for patients and their doctors to improve self management. Through this work and other projects, Dr. Ivers hopes to help front-line providers achieve population health goals and prevent future public health crises.