Fall 2021 Alumni Magazine Digital Copy

How have Drs. Shannon Scott and Lisa
Hartling mentored and prepared you for your
research?
Drs. Scott and Hartling have been preparing
me to pursue an academic tenure-track
career, and a key part of that has been
mentoring me through the early career
planning process. This involves connecting
me to other postdoctoral fellows who have
shared their experiences, guiding me through
the process of developing a research
program, and sharing opportunities for
professional development. Drs. Scott and Dr.
Hartling have also shared lessons learned
from their own careers developing a
nationally recognized research program.
How does it feel to work with an
interdisciplinary team? Is this something
you have a lot of experience with?
Working with an interdisciplinary team is
always a pleasure, and one of the reasons I
enjoy working in a field at the intersection of
medicine and technology; working on these
teams has been my norm on digital health
projects.
Interdisciplinary work benefits from multiple
perspectives: when we are building an app
for parents, we will involve team members
with expertise ranging from clinical
experience, to qualitative methods, to
computing science, to knowledge
translation. I think that as we negotiate the
path toward cohort-based, and eventually
fully personalized medicine, these teams will
drive innovative digital health projects
forward.
What does receiving the WCHRI PDF Award
mean to you? How will this award advance
your project?
I was honoured to receive a WCHRI PDF
award, and hope our work will contribute
meaningfully to improving children's health.
This award will support our work leading
innovative approaches to knowledge
translation, and importantly, developing an
app with high-quality evidence-based content
in children's health. My goal in pursuing this
research with Drs. Scott and Hartling is to
learn the processes they have used to
consistently create nationally-awarded, highquality
evidence-based knowledge
translation tools in children's health. I hope
to contribute to this field myself by
embedding and evaluating the effectiveness
of these tools in a highly accessible
platform for parents.
What impact do you hope this project makes
once completed?
By working with parents to co-create an app
that embodies these values, we hope to
contribute a useful tool to their digital care
options in the near future. In the long-term,
we hope that by pioneering this work, we will
establish a well-defined process for cocreating
health apps with parents.
Canadian parents deserve
information for their
child’s health that is
trusted, practical, and
accessible. — James Benoit
Any plans for the future?
I would like to expand the scope of this work
to examine how else we might augment
knowledge translation with machine learning
to improve children’s health. Apps have
provided a useful tool for health researchers,
and I would like to expand our ability to
simultaneously provide high-quality
information and capture how parents
integrate this knowledge with health
decisions for their children.
Interested in learning more? A joint effort between the
Alberta Research Centre for Health Evidence (ARCHE)
and Evidence in Child Health to Enhance Outcomes
(ECHO) research programs develop free health resources
based on the latest research to help families and
caregivers care for their sick children. These evidencebased
knowledge translation tools are available online,
at https://echokt.ca/tools.
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