IC4U – Patient Engagement Platform

Project Description:

Patient and family engagement can improve health outcomes and reduce health costs. From a broad perspective, citizen engagement in health care and research is gaining traction as a compelling mechanism for enhancing quality of care.The shift towards seeing citizens as partners, rather than subjects or patients, is guiding research and clinical care to focus on the aspects that matter most and to which patients and families want to contribute.IC4U is a project collaboration between the Social Innovation Lab at Algonquin College,Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group to support patient and family engagement in Canadian critical care research.The platform will initially be used in Pediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs) across Canada.Our approach at improving patient engagement in critical care research is to develop a modern, cloud based web application that is easy to use and has necessary features to harness project collaboration and communication between clinical teams and ICU patients and family members willing to become research partners.IC4U Users will be able to Sign Up and personalize their account by sharing their stories and areas of interest. Once an account is created, users will have access to the IC4U platform, where they can get informed about current research studies or join a research study as a partner. The research team can engage with patients and their families to get input on different aspects of their research study using task features on the platform (e.g. surveys, document review, chat tools).Some example research studies users should expect include: Mobility and physio in the PICUs, Music in the PICU, Biobank Studies etc.In the background, the platform will be using the most modern technologies and infrastructure to ensure scalability. We are achieving this by using React as a front end framework. The platform will be packaged in a Docker container and served to AWS which is arguably the most reliable cloud infrastructure.

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