Algonquin College research collaboration with CHEO receives $91,000 from Innovation Fund
Posted on Monday, April 9th, 2018
April 9, 2018 (OTTAWA) —An innovative applied research collaboration to bring medical information closer to patients has received $91,000.
This new investment will accelerate an ongoing research collaboration between the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Algonquin College.
The new funding was awarded by the Children’s Hospital Academic Medical Organization Innovation Fund competition through the Innovation Fund provincial oversight committee.
The funding (over two years) supports a joint project called Insight Scope, a crowdsourcing software platform that aims to significantly accelerate the synthesis and translation of medical evidence to the bedside.
The platform automates the process of conducting systematic reviews, the fundamental approach on which most treatment and health policy decisions are based. Insight Scope will allow investigative teams to receive help with their systematic reviews from a large online crowd of interested students, health care professionals, researchers and citizen scientists.
The idea for the software was conceived by Dr. Dayre McNally, a pediatric intensivist and clinician-scientist at the CHEO, and has been developed by Algonquin student teams through the Office of Applied Research and Innovation’s Health and Wellness Research Centre.
The collaboration evolved from Hacking Health Ottawa’s inaugural #HIP613 Hackathon in 2017 where Insight Scope won the IBM Watson Grand Prize and Impact Hub Ottawa Prize. Since that time, with funding support through NSERC’s College and Community Innovation Program, the Algonquin student teams have worked with the CHEO team to design and prototype the software platform.
The new $91,000 in funding will support further development and assessment of the software platform.
The Insight Scope student team will be part of the RE/ACTION: Applied Research Showcase on April 13, 2018 at Algonquin College.
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Ruth Dunley
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Algonquin College
613-727-4723 ext. 6452
613-406-0970
dunleyr@algonquincollege.com
Chris Lackner
Communications Officer
Algonquin College
613-727-4723 ext. 2091
613-220-3479
lacknec@algonquincollege.com