We are pleased to announce that both TRANSFORM HF’s applicants to the 2022 CIHR Health System Impact Fellowship competition, Sarah Lawrason and Samuel Petrie, were successful!
Only 27 out of 70 post-doctoral fellow applicants were awarded. Many congratulations to Sarah and Samuel for being named part of this impressive group, both of whom will be co-funded by CIHR and TRANSFORM HF and supervised by Dr. Emily Seto and Anne Simard.
Keep reading to learn more about TRANSFORM HF’s Health System Impact Fellows and their projects.
Understanding Patient Experiences with Innovations in Heart Failure Care
Sarah Lawrason
Sarah’s research will use mixed methods to understand patient experiences with innovations in heart failure care. Specifically, she will be assessing employments of digital health programs and nurse-led models of care for complex patients. By working with important stakeholders like patients and staff to directly influence care outcomes through knowledge translation, Sarah hopes to ultimately improve patient experiences and outcomes across Ontario.
I am looking forward to learning more about decision making and implementation in clinical care settings. Ultimately, I hope to bridge the research-to-practice gap by working with partners to create useful, relevant solutions that support healthcare issues.
Situated within academic and health systems, TRANSFORM HF unites a team of researchers and patient and community partners to achieve this goal – from biomedical engineering to implementation science. I am excited to conduct partnered research that examines patient experiences with digital innovations in heart failure care.
Sarah completed her SSHRC- and WorkSafe BC-funded PhD at UBC Okanagan in 2022 in the SCI Action Canada Lab. Before moving to Kelowna, she did her BScH in Kinesiology (2016) and MSc in Sport Psychology (2018) at Queen’s University. Using mixed methods, Sarah’s research focuses on improving quality experiences in physical activity, community-based program evaluation, and mHealth intervention development.
Addressing the Rural Health Access Equity Gap by Scaling a Heart Failure Digital Therapeutic from an Acute Setting to Community Settings within Ontario, Canada
Samuel Petrie
Medly has had great success in improving patient outcomes in large, urban hospitals. Now Medly will be deployed in rural settings to address gaps in specialist care available to rural Ontarians. Samuel will be analyzing the data associated with Medly deployment in rural Ontario through a rural health systems perspective. His analysis will also include contextual facilitators and challenges in previously completed deployments. Through this work, Samuel will be able to develop and distribute a comprehensive framework for future digital implementation efforts.
I hope as one of the CIHR Health System Impact Fellows, I can use this opportunity to improve equitable access to health care for rural Canadians. TRANSFORM HF is on the leading edge of heart research, and maximizing the reach and impact of heart failure innovations is a priority for both myself and TRANSFORM HF throughout this fellowship.
Samuel Petrie is a Health System Impact Fellow at University of Toronto and University Health Network. Originally from Halifax, he completed his BKI at the University of Waterloo in 2016, and his PhD in Health Sciences at Carleton University. His research interests include the scalability of pilot projects, the demographics of high cost health users, and the use of tele-health / eHealth technologies to better serve rural communities.
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