CPIN Digital Communications Study

Seeking family physicians and nurse practitioners! Join this timely and important study to foster patient engagement and health outcomes through digital communications.

Our team of family physician researchers from the University of Ottawa and the Montfort Hospital has partnered with experts from the Eastern Ontario Health Unit and the University of Ottawa Communications department to help you communicate with your patients efficiently and effectively using digital messages.

This innovative research project uses 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 their practice and health related topics to groups of patients by email or text.

CPIN seeks to learn with primary care practices on how to improve patient communication and outcomes by engaging in practice based digital patient communication, education and collection of patient experience measures. Specifically, we will test and scale the CPIN system to measure patient’s experiences with healthcare integration, access to care and health information, their unmet information needs, and how CPIN can improve efficiency in practice operations, including patient engagement.

CPIN Digital Communications Study

CPIN is a primary care practice tool that addresses the pressing need for infrastructure and mechanisms to engage patients across the small independent primary care practices where they receive most of their care and care coordination. The goal of this study is to implement the CPIN to measure patient’s experiences with healthcare integration, access to care and health information, patients’ preferred source of health information, their unmet information needs, and how CPIN will help improve efficiency in routine practice operations, including patient engagement. As part of the CPIN Digital Communications Study, we use three communications approaches to suit providers’ communication needs across the country to send messages to their patients. A link to an online survey helps us gather feedback on patient reported measures to understand their experiences navigating the health system. Focus groups with patients will help gather their perspectives on the utility and design of received health messages and the use of collected data.

Benefits for your patients and for your practice

CPIN allows you to rapidly inform your patients about new procedures for clinic visits or patient education materials for managing a wide range of conditions, such as 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 patients’ experiences and information needs. As part of our research project, we include survey questions on patient reported measures to understand patient experiences navigating the health system. Our team, working with communications and public health experts, develops tailored health information messages based on the information needs reported by patients.

Participation is free and simple

We are recruiting up to 100 physicians and nurse practitioners with a family/general practice (i.e. not a focused practice) and with their own roster of patients. We offer participating providers the patient outreach messages and survey campaigns on topics of their choice. We also compensate each participating provider with up to $500 for their time being oriented on the CPIN system and study.

Find out more

If you are interested in participating or would like further information about the study, please contact us at info@cpin-rcip.com or fill out this form. For questions concerning ethical aspects of this research, contact the Hôpital Montfort Research Ethics Board at 613-746-4621, ext. 2221, or by email at ethique@montfort.on.ca.