Over the last century, Women’s College Hospital has built a legacy in healthcare innovation. Where public policy meets practice, the WCH Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care (WIHV) was created to find new ways of transforming the way that patients experience their care, support better long-term health outcomes and lower the cost of managing chronic illness in the system.
Whether it’s evaluating an app that allows patients with chronic kidney disease to order supplies and manage dialysis at home or a telemedicine intervention that connects people in remote parts of the country with their doctor, WIHV is a living laboratory for health system solutions in Ontario and beyond.
It’s one thing to generate new medical knowledge, it’s a whole other to ensure that knowledge benefits as many people as possible. Our team uses implementation science to close the gap between ideas and action and takes an equity lens to ensure that those who most need healthcare can get it in a way that works for them.
The Ontario Healthcare Implementation Laboratory
Working with multiple provincial organizations and agencies, WIHV is leveraging data to evaluate large-scale quality improvement activities in the health system. Currently, the team is investigating the role of family doctors in improving opioid prescribing practices. We have found that there is a clear opportunity for better intervention strategies targeting family physicians, in order to more effectively support them in managing patients’ with a high-risk opioid prescription. Our initial findings have been published in BMC Family Practice and Annals of Family Medicine. Our team is also involved in large scale initiatives to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions in primary care in Ontario. It has been estimated that 25 to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed by Ontario family physician are unnecessary. We are working with patients, family physician organizations, as well as Public Health Ontario and Ontario Health to tackle this issue. Through the use of personalized audit and feedback letters, our team hopes to provide Ontario family physicians with the tools and knowledge they need to improve their antibiotic prescribing. A detailed protocol for some of this work has been published in Implementation Science.
For more information, visit WIHV.
- WCH clinical evaluation
- Virtual care & digital health evaluation
- Health system & policy innovation
- Implementation science
Our Team
- Dr. Ibukun Abejirinde, Scientist
- Jesmin Antony, Research Associate
- Abigail Appiahene-Afriyie, Research Assistant
- Emily Nicholas Angl, Patient Advisor
- Archchun Ariyarajah, Practice Facilitator
- Ravninder Bahniwal, Practice Facilitator
- Zachary Bouck, Biostatistician
- Shivani Chandra, Operational Lead
- Jawad Chishtie, Practice Facilitator
- Cherry Chu, Biostatistician
- Joseph Donia, Research Assistant
- Jane Ebreo, Administrative Assistant
- Jamie Fujioka, Research Coordinator
- Simranjit Gill, Practice Facilitator
- Dara Gordon, Research Coordinator
- Bilal Khan, Research Assistant
- Vanessa Kishimoto, Research Assistant
- Natasha Kithulegoda, Implementation Specialist
- Leah Kelley, Research Coordinator
- Meagan Lacroix, Research Coordinator
- Celia Laur, Scientific Lead, Office of Spread and Scale
- Rebecca Liu, Research Associate
- Megan Nguyen, Research Coordinator
- Marlena Dang Nguyen, Research Coordinator
- Catherine Reis, Research Coordinator
- Geneviève Rouleau, Postdoctoral Fellow
- Marianne Saragosa, Research Coordinator
- Huda Shah, Research Coordinator
- Simone Shahid, Research Coordinator
- Jay Shaw, Scientist
- Jennifer Shuldiner, Postdoctoral Fellow
- Thivja Sribaskaran, Research Assistant
- Diya Srinivasan, Research Associate
- Vess Stamenova, Research Lead
- Mina Tadrous, Scientist
- Kelly Thai, Research Assistant
- Alana Tibbles, Research Coordinator
- Denis Tsang, Practice Facilitator
- Ena Ujic, Manager, Virtual Care
- Camille Williams, Evaluation Specialist
- Kelly Wu, Research Assistant
- Payal Agarwal, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Innovation Fellow and WIHV Co-Founder
- Julie Bickford, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Natasha Bollegala, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Trevor Champagne, Innovation Fellow
- Laura Desveaux, Innovation Fellow
- Will Falk, Senior Advisor, Virtual Care
- Dr. Ben Fine, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Ilana Halperin, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Jennifer Hensel, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Noah Ivers, Innovation Fellow & Scientist
- Dr. Trevor Jamieson, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Darren Larson, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Aisha Lofters, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Mona Loufty, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Danielle Martin, Innovation Fellow & WIHV Co-Founder
- Dr. Gettha Mukerji, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Stephen Pomedii, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Vanessa Redditt, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Heidi Schmidt, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Sohaib Siddiqui, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Aman Sidhi, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. David Urbach, Seniour Innovation Fellow
- Jeremy Veillard, Innovation Fellow
- Dr. Simone Vigod, Innovation Fellow
- Ross Wallace, Innovation Fellow
- Ivy Wong, Innovation Fellow
- Denise Zarn, Innovation Fellow
Key Findings
Digital Health Technologies for More Equitable Health Systems: A Discussion Paper
Clinical Considerations when Applying Machine Learning to Decision-Support Tasks Versus Automation by Dr. Trevor Jamieson and Avi Goldfarb
Collateral Damage: The Unintended Consequences of Misguided Hospital Funding Reform by Dr. Noah Ivers, Karen S. Palmer & Dr. David Wasserstein
Strategies for Health Systems to Engage the IT-Enabled Consumer by Dr Onil Bhattacharyya, Lovisa Gustafsson & Dr. Eric Schneider
Beyond “implementation:” digital health innovation and service design by Jay Shaw, Dr. Payal Agarwal, Dr. Daniel Cornejo Palma, Vess Stamenova, Dr. Trevor Jamieson, Rebecca Yang, Dr. Sacha Bhatia & Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya
Drawing lessons from Canada’s experience with single-payer health insurance by Dr. Noah Ivers, Steini Brown & Allan Detsky
Virtual Healthcare Revolution Here to Stay by Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Trevor Jamieson, James Shaw, Carole Piovesan, Leah Kelley, & Will Falk
Community Knowledge for Equity in Healthcare by James Shaw, Philina Sky and Shivani Chandra