Health Access and Innovation Lab (HAIL)
About the Team
Welcome to the research collaboration led by Dr. Lise M. Bjerre and Dr. Jonathan Fitzsimon, affiliated with both the University of Ottawa and the Institut du Savoir Montfort. Our multidisciplinary team is committed to enhancing family medicine and healthcare access through rigorous, evidence-based research. Our work focuses on access and quality of primary care, using diverse methods, including population health data, geospatial mapping, mixed methods studies and AI to evaluate and improve the care provided to patients, including medication appropriateness.
HAIL
Team Members
Research Themes
Access to Care
Using innovative, data-driven approaches, our group’s research aims to improve and facilitate access to primary care, particularly for vulnerable and underserved communities. Our research integrates new technologies and novel analytical approaches to evaluate population health data and enhance healthcare research and access.
Innovative Tools and Methods
Our team has a particular interest in employing novel tools and methodologies to improve healthcare access and enhance population health research. This work often involves collaboration with data scientists who are experts in their methodological fields, such as geomapping technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Medication Appropriateness
Our group specializes in researching medication appropriateness, focusing on evaluating the costs and effects of polypharmacy and inappropriate prescribing at the population level, and the development of deprescribing guidelines to help optimize medication use across Canada and internationally. Previously, our group led the development of a clinical practice guideline for deprescribing antipsychotic medications.
Language and Health
As advocates for access to healthcare in a patient’s language of choice, our research focuses on the effects of linguistic or language-related factors in healthcare. This includes pioneering research on patient-provider language concordance in Canada, an important factor that has been found to affect care quality, patient outcomes, and healthcare expenditures.