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 patients’ experiences and information needs.
As part of this research project, we include survey questions on COVID-19 vaccination status of patients and their children (age 6 months and older), as well as reasons for parents’ hesitation or lack of interest among those who have not yet decided whether to (or who do not intend to) vaccinate their children. Our team, working with communications and public health experts, develops messages to address parent vaccine hesitancy, based on characteristics such as age, rurality, etc. and the reasons they are hesitating to have their children vaccinated. These messages are sent to groups of parent patients for whom they are tailored, by email or text message using CPIN. Our researchers are measuring whether this tailored and targeted digital communication from primary care providers increases vaccine uptake in children, as reported by parents.
Learn more about CPIN’s benefits for patients and practices.
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 offer participating providers the patient outreach messages, surveys and feedback on vaccine hesitancy in their practice, as well as three additional patient outreach message and survey campaigns on topics of their choice, over one year. We also compensate each participating provider $125 for their time being oriented on the CPIN system and study.