PIRN Vice-Chair Dr. Peter Gill Awarded PSI New Investigator Award

Dr. Peter Gill, PIRN Vice-Chair, along with PIRN Chair Dr. Sanjay Mahant and Dr. Teresa To, have been awarded a Physicians’ Services Incorporated Foundation (PSI) New Investigator Award for the project titled: “A Data-driven Approach to Identify High Priority Research Topics for Pediatric Hospital Care in Ontario.”

Despite the high costs of hospital care, there is a lack of high-quality research evidence on the diagnosis and treatment of hospitalized children on the general pediatric inpatient unit. The project aims to develop a research agenda outlining the health conditions that should be prioritized for research in Ontario based on the burden of illness on the healthcare system, including how costly and common conditions are. However, recent Canadian data on hospital burden of illness in children does not exist. Therefore, this project will use health administrative data to describe the cost, variation in cost, and prevalence of hospitalization by condition in children in Ontario from 2014 to 2018. Additionally, the project will identify the most costly and/or common conditions in hospitalized children.

Findings from this project will be important to help prioritize research topics for researchers and research funding agencies in Ontario, and can be used to prioritize quality improvement efforts in hospitals and the healthcare system. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to direct research efforts to areas of high priority to build a stronger evidence-base, to improve outcomes of hospitalized children, and optimize the performance of the healthcare system.