Governing partnerships with technology companies as part of the COVID-19 response in Canada: A qualitative case study.

Cross-sector partnerships are vital for maintaining resilient health systems; however, few studies have sought to empirically assess the barriers and enablers of effective and responsible partnerships during public health emergencies. Through a qualitative, multiple case study, we analyzed 210 documents and conducted 26 interviews with stakeholders in three real-world partnerships between Canadian health organizations and private technology startups during the COVID-19 pandemic. The three partnerships involved: 1) deploying a virtual care platform to care for COVID-19 patients at one hospital, 2) deploying a secure messaging platform for physicians at another hospital, and 3) using data science to support a public health organization. Our results demonstrate that a public health emergency created time and resource pressures throughout a partnership. Given these constraints, early and sustained alignment on the core problem was critical for success. Moreover, governance processes designed for normal operations, such as procurement, were triaged and streamlined. Social learning, or the process of learning from observing others, offset some time and resource pressures. Social learning took many forms ranging from informal conversations between individuals at peer organisations (e.g., hospital chief information officers) to standing meetings at the local university's city-wide COVID-19 response table. We also found that startups' flexibility and understanding of the local context enabled them to play a highly valuable role in emergency response. However, pandemic fueled "hypergrowth" created risks for startups, such as introducing opportunities for deviation away from their core value proposition. Finally, we found each partnership navigated intense workloads, burnout, and personnel turnover through the pandemic. Strong partnerships required healthy, motivated teams. Visibility into and engagement in partnership governance, belief in partnership impact, and strong emotional intelligence in managers promoted team well-being. Taken together, these findings can help to bridge the theory-to-practice gap and guide effective cross-sector partnerships during public health emergencies.

Can the Healthcare System Improve Food Security? A Need for Collaborative Community Partnerships.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the food insecurity crisis in Canada, and existing supports have been largely insufficient to meet the food needs of communities. In response to increasing reports of food insecurity among Toronto residents during the pandemic, the Food RX program was developed as a collaborative initiative between FoodShare Toronto - a local, community-based food justice organization - and the University Health Network, a large university-affiliated hospital network in downtown Toronto, ON. This commentary describes the Food RX program, highlights the lessons learned during its early implementation and offers a set of recommendations for building community partnerships moving forward.

Human factors applications in the design of decision support systems for population health: a scoping review.

INTRODUCTION: Public health professionals engage in complex cognitive tasks, often using evidence-based decision support tools to bolster their decision-making. Human factors methods take a user-centred approach to improve the design of systems, processes, and interfaces to better support planning and decision-making. While human factors methods have been applied to the design of clinical health tools, these methods are limited in the design of tools for population health. The objective of this scoping review is to develop a comprehensive understanding of how human factors techniques have been applied in the design of population health decision support tools. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The scoping review will follow the methodology and framework proposed by Arksey and O'Malley. We include English-language documents between January 1990 and August 2021 describing the development, validation or application of human factors principles to decision support tools in population health. The search will include Ovid MEDLINE: Epub Ahead of Print, In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations, Ovid MEDLINE Daily and Ovid MEDLINE 1946-present; EMBASE, Scopus, PsycINFO, Compendex, IEEE Xplore and Inspec. The results will be integrated into Covidence. First, the abstract of all identified articles will be screened independently by two reviewers with disagreements being resolved by a third reviewer. Next, the full text for articles identified as include or inconclusive will be reviewed by two independent reviewers, leading to a final decision regarding inclusion. Reference lists of included articles will be manually screened to identify additional studies. Data will be extracted by one reviewer, verified by a second, and presented according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethics approval is not required for this work as human participants are not involved. The completed review will be published in a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal.