Health-care technologies: How Sylvie Grosjean’s research is changing care

That question is key to the research of Sylvie Grosjean, who holds the International Francophonie Research Chair on Digital Health Technologies. Taking a co-design approach, she studies how to integrate technologies in health-care practice without them substituting for expertise, experience and human presence.

A technology being innovative doesn’t guarantee that it will be adopted. Adoption depends on its acceptability, which must take into account an affected community’s customs, values and needs. “What interests me is how digital health care technologies are used and how we can think about their design with patients and professionals,” says Grosjean. That’s why she uses a co-design approach that integrates users from the outset when these technologies are developed.

Relying on a collaborative, inclusive approach, that is, co-design, these innovations have the potential to significantly improve access to and quality of health care, including for francophone minorities with pressing needs for heath care in their own language.

In a study conducted among and with Ontario francophones, Grosjean was able to identify, among other things, three essential accessibility criteria:

• Taking into account francophone communities’ linguistic and cultural uniqueness: Technologies must be designed with and for francophone communities for them to be adapted to the latter’s needs concerning access to care, but also to take into account francophones’ cultural and linguistic differences.
• Thinking about integration of these technologies within the continuity of care: Patients and professionals want tools that augment, not replace, service offerings in French.
• Having social value and developing caring technologies: Users must see the potential added value of these technologies, and not fear losing the human element of care.

In Grosjean’s work, these criteria guide the development of technologies. As well, to offer a simple, fun and uniquely francophone gateway, her team created a comic presenting research findings on the future of online care in Ontario.

A co-design approach is essential, both to further acceptability and adoption of technologies in the health-care network and to ensure they’re relevant right from the time of development. By having patients, caregivers, engineers and researchers participate in the technology’s development stage, Grosjean enables the creation of tools adapted to the reality on the ground.

Customization is a key element in Grosjean’s research. Her team is working on a platform (called eCARE-PD) made for people living with Parkinson’s and aiming to adapt health-care advice according to each individual’s profile. “A newly diagnosed person doesn’t have the same needs as a patient who has lived with the disease for 15 years,” she says.

Grosjean’s research team is therefore working on a chat-based recommendation system powered by artificial intelligence able to adapt advice according to each person’s profile. As part of the project. she has taken a co-design approach so as to bring together people receiving care, caring for others, working in the health-care sector or engineering, or with experience in social sciences or the humanities, to foster dialogue among them and enable development of useful, personalized, but also caring, technology.

While digital health-care technologies appear promising, they shouldn’t be deployed as a simplistic response to the shortage of health-care professionals. Thoughtful integration of these tools depends on close collaboration between researchers, caregivers, patients and business, to guide decision-makers. Grosjean’s research shows that technologies can’t be adopted by decree — there must be user involvement, taking into account their needs and values.

By adopting a collaborative, inclusive approach and paying close attention to technology use, we can understand how these innovations could improve access to and quality of care, particularly for francophone minorities.