For complex inquiries, the process could take months, frustrating curious clinicians who must endure long waits before obtaining answers to their important questions. Determined to find a better way, the hospital decided to implement a self-service data platform that enables users to gather, use, and share data-driven insights while fully protecting patient privacy. Now the users on the platform and the IT teams supporting the technology are partners with a higher-level focus on quality improvement instead of managing data requests and prioritization.

In one project Marcel Miron-Celis, a Methodologist with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, worked on a study evaluating the safety of treating cancer-associated pulmonary embolism in an outpatient setting. Marcel stated the self-service approach "allowed us to narrow down the cohort to 739 patient encounters, which likely saved the clinician stakeholders hundreds of hours that they would have spent performing chart reviews on hundreds of thousands of patient encounters to identify potential patients that met those criteria.” Marcel compared this effort to working in traditional query tools and estimated the traditional approach could have taken up to four to six business days and required the expertise of analyst resources, whereas with the self-service technology, a researcher can easily do this work in as little as two days.


Among other projects that TOH clinicians launched was a study of risk factors associated with ischemic stroke in cancer patients. About 10% of patients with ischemic stroke, a condition in which the brain’s blood supply is reduced, also have cancer. Ischemic stroke is a leading cause of disability and the second-leading cause of death worldwide, so the ability to identify treatment strategies to prevent its occurrence in cancer patients is critical.

Using data from TOH Data Warehouse of 10,875 patients from 2000 to 2019, the research team compared two patient groups: First, all patients who had both a cancer diagnosis and an ischemic stroke within a 2-year period after their cancer diagnosis, and second, all ischemic stroke patients without cancer.

At the study’s conclusion, researchers found that cancer patients with ischemic stroke have a higher prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, previous ischemic stroke, and venous thromboembolism, and that previous ischemic stroke is an important predictor of recurrent stroke in cancer patients. The results highlight the importance of identifying optimal secondary prevention treatments in cancer patients, according to the researchers.

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