Accelerating data adoption

“The enterprise data strategy will help ensure everyone is getting the right data and of the highest quality to inform decision making and planning across SickKids.”

– Rachel Solomon, Chief Data Officer

Data is a key foundation of achieving the SickKids 2025 vision of unprecedented outcomes powered by Precision Child Health. Teams have developed an enterprise data strategy that will help accelerate adoption of data, methods and approaches to support better, faster and actionable insights for decision-making across SickKids, from clinical care to research to education and organizational performance.  

The enterprise data strategy serves as a roadmap to ensure a unified and comprehensive approach to data governance, analytics excellence, data quality, policies and standards across the organization. As part of the strategy, a data architecture model – a blueprint for how data is acquired, transported, stored, queried and secured – has been established and an implementation plan is in process.  

Several initiatives are helping support the vision of the data strategy, including a new tool to support staff with business intelligence and research data requests. ReportingNow was launched to streamline reporting, ensure methodological rigour and support staff in using only the most reliable data. 

On the clinical side, the first phase of a project is underway to support the systematic collection of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMS) data to support measurement-based care. This has included a streamlined intake and prioritization process for PROMs collection and integration into Epic, our electronic health record, to help embed them as part of the care journey care. The work has been led through a SickKids PROMs Governing Council launched in 2021. As part of the Mental Health Strategy, a project to support collection of mental health-related PROMs for anxiety and depression will be integrated into clinical practice for youth across the hospital – to better identify patients with mental health challenges and see change over time. 

Thinking beyond SickKids’ doors, a Data Trust for external data sharing was also created to help set policies and guidelines for sharing data responsibly and securely with other partner organizations.