Our team of family physicians from the University of Ottawa and the Montfort Hospital has partnered with the Eastern Ontario Health Unit multimedia communications team to help you communicate with your patients efficiently and effectively using digital messages.
The Public Health Agency of Canada has provided funding for an innovative research project using the Canadian Primary Care Information Network (CPIN), an automated patient engagement system for primary care practices, to enable family physicians and nurse practitioners to send messages about practice or COVID-19 related topics to groups of patients by email or text.
Benefits for your patients and for your practice
CPIN allows you to rapidly inform your patients about new procedures for clinic visits, availability of vaccines from COVID-19 to flu, or patient education materials for managing conditions like back pain. It also offers a reliable and confidential system to collect anonymous feedback on patients’ experiences by including a link to a short survey at the end of each message. You can choose from our library of prepared messages and surveys, or you can create your own. This system de-identifies your patient survey responses and reports them back to you, allowing you to better understand your patient’s experiences and information needs.
As part of our research project, we will include survey questions on COVID-19 vaccination status or interest and reasons for hesitation or lack of interest among your unvaccinated patients who respond. Our team, working with communications and public health experts, will develop messages to address vaccine hesitancy, based on patient characteristics such as age, rurality, etc. and the reasons why they are not vaccinated. These messages will then be sent to groups of patients for whom they are tailored, by email or text message using CPIN. Our researchers will measure whether this tailored and targeted digital communication from primary care providers increases vaccine uptake.
Participation is free and simple
We are recruiting 300 physicians and nurse practitioners with a family/general practice (i.e. not specializing in a narrow set of conditions or treatments) and with their own list of patients. We will offer participating providers the patient outreach, survey and feedback services free for one year. This is a value of $500 per practice (waived one-time fee) and $500 per provider (waived annual fee for the year). We will also compensate each participating provider $125 for their time being oriented on the CPIN system and study.
BC Primary Health Care Research Network 