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This spring, the Ontario SPOR SUPPORT Unit (OSSU) celebrated ten years of advancing health research through patient-oriented approaches. On April 10th, OSSU marked this milestone with its Research Day—a vibrant event that convened over 200 in-person attendees and 120 virtual participants to showcase the progress and promise of patient-partnered research across Ontario. The gathering emphasized how OSSU has reshaped research culture to center patient voices in evidence generation, implementation, and policy development.

Laying the Groundwork: Early Career Researchers and Patient Engagement

The day before Research Day, on April 9, 2025, OSSU hosted an event for early career researchers, Patients as Partners. This half-day event primed the next generation of researchers with workshops on the foundations of patient-and community-partnered research. A panel, led by Kerry Kuluski, and joined by Mark Weir, Dianne Fierheller, and Angela Carter from Trillium Better Health and the Peel Region, provided a workshop on building patient engagement in the field. In summarizing the panel, Angela Carter provided apt comments on the impact of community-partnered research and the role of early career researchers in patient-oriented research.

Maureen Smith, an active patient partner, shared practical insights from her journey into making patient-oriented research impactful; and Amy Lang, Executive Director CIHR Patient-Oriented Research provided an overview of the SPOR initiative. Participants concluded the day with a lively networking dinner which left participants energized, before heading into OSSU’s full Research Day equipped with both context and connection.

“We Built Something Remarkable”: Reflecting on OSSU’s Legacy

OSSU’s Research Day opened with remarks from Executive Director Vasanthi Srinivasan, Scientific Director Dean Fergusson, and Sean Twyford, Assistant Deputy Minister at the Ontario Ministry of Health. Twyford highlighted the province’s $85 million commitment to patient-oriented research, emphasizing that, “When patients, funders, policymakers, and researchers are aligned, patients and citizens are the true beneficiaries.” Therefore, the day began with a focus on putting patients at the centre of health care decisions, building access and capacity in Ontario’s health data ecosystem, and mobilizing new evidence to inform a learning health system.

Scattered between the panels was the inclusion of testimonials from OSSU’s founding and current leaders.

David Henry, OSSU’s founding Scientific Co-Lead, reflected:

“What has happened since the inception of OSSU has been remarkable…OSSU’s hub-and-spoke model has connected geographically and thematically diverse centres around principal themes. Its longevity is a testament to the original ideas and the hard work of the OSSU team.”

Paula Rochon, a champion of inclusive research, shared:

“OSSU has recognized the importance of embedding sex and gender into patient-oriented research from the start. Through its support, we’ve elevated sex and gender-based analysis and created more inclusive and impactful findings. These are no longer afterthoughts, but priorities.”

Panels that Inspired: Mobilizing Knowledge and Sustaining Impact

The day’s panels spanned key issues at the intersection of research, equity, and health research and health system transformation.

OSSU had the privilege of having members of OSSU’s Board moderate each session.

Equity and Patient Engagement

This panel was moderated by Cathy Craven and involved panelists from across OSSU’s Centres and Initiatives discussing how OSSU-supported projects are addressing health disparities by centering patient voices from equity-deserving communities. Nav Persaud, Paula Rochon, Astrid Guttmann, Sujitha Ratnasingham, Sharon Johnston, Justin Presseau, and Jo Henderson each described their work and how OSSU’s support has amplified equity in the projects they are engaged in. They emphasized OSSU’s role in fostering intersectoral collaboration, building trust, and engagement capacity and how across their projects they identified and worked to addressing inequities to remove barriers in specific contexts and for specific vulnerable and marginalized groups to address social, economic, and environmental barriers to engaging in health research and for the health outcomes of citizens. Overall, this panel explored how diversity of perspectives, of individuals, and inclusion are critical to building capacity for engaged research and relationship building for health research that impacts the users and moving research into policy that takes differences and equity into account with broad representation.

Artificial Intelligence and Primary Care

Experts, Payal Agarwal, Jay Shaw, and Onil Bhattacharyya, came together in a panel moderated by Board member Marisa Granieri, to explore the integration of AI tools in clinical care and how tools, such as AI scribes may enhance the productivity of clinicians while empowering patients. An AI experiment showed that AI scribes reduced documentation time by 70%, allowing clinicians to redirect focus to patient care, thereby increasing trust, relational capacity, and redefining the physician’s mental health. For researchers at the forefront of AI, how to engage patients in the co-design of ethics and operation of AI in healthcare is also crucial. This includes the creation of governance systems to evaluate the use of AI that can be modified as the technology advances and providing capacity building for the tools that are coming out to help better understand health disease and to navigate the health system. Questions include how those in the system may work collectively to be able to be responsive and rigorous in understanding which tools work and which provide care quality for a more equitable health system, as well as evaluating risk mitigation. Onil summed it up when he shared his vision to create an AI marketplace with regulatory bodies to make it easier for doctors to sign on and to scale implementation for roll-out and to power share with patients.

Pitching POR

Short, engaging “elevator pitches” highlighted OSSU-supported tools and resources, from implementation science guides to community hospital engagement strategies, a course on AI, a scan of patient engagement supports with an eye towards sustainability of POR, and a product summarizing OSSU’s policy roundtables. Links to these outputs are available on OSSU’s website, currently found on our Research Day 2025 page under the panel title, Publication Announcements.

Mental Health Systems Transformation

Paul Kurdyak, Graham Woodward, and David Rudoler presented on performance accountability, system integration, and the development of tools like a mental health system playbook. The panelists, moderated by Zahra Ismail, discussed how responding to population-based needs and responding to data has allowed for more meaningful measurement of whom accesses services and what the quality is of those services. The discussion then focused on the solution, as the creation of a playbook that is working towards defining evidence-based care and making progress on performance measurement accountability for a comprehensive connected care health system for mental health that uses right time data for planning purposes. Paul Kurdyak emphasized the role of lived experience in making research relevant and actionable. Graham Woodward and David Rudoler emphasized the role that a hub-based model, such as Wellness Hubs, has in integrating service delivery with accountability. In sum, the panelists emphasized that though there is no cohesive mental health system in place, they are working together to understand coordination and shared accountability for mental health and to create performance-based oversight for the sector.    

Patient Partners Shaping and Advancing Patient Partnership

Patient leaders Alies Maybee, Sandra Holdsworth, and Annette McKinnon joined together by Board Member and patient partner, Maureen Smith, to discuss how patient engagement has matured—from tokenism to co-design and co-leadership. They discussed building trust and developing relationships to engage diverse people from different backgrounds and different perspectives to “widen the entry door” to patient engaged research and to engage patients in ways that are not dependent on project funding but that can span projects. The panel reflected on how building capacity for patient partnered research is creating accountability and shifting policies and practices from siloed to collaborative research and engagement as well as shifting and embracing cultural change and power narratives. Testimony from Alies Maybee described the capacity that OSSU has helped unlock in building such capacity:

“Vasanthi had us believe that patient and caregiver partners could create something of value based on our experience… OSSU supported us in creating planning tools, evaluation surveys, and even the Patient Advisory Network across Canada.”

This support, of the Patient Advisory Network, according to the panelists, has precluded improvements in patient engagement that moves the focus from individual researchers and teams at the micro-level and moves funding requirements that includes considerations and criteria of funding that supports patient engagement ability and best practice. The panelists emphasized that they are “deeply invested in the future of healthcare and in health research and that (they) want at least some research to be patient led”. The panel wrapped up with the panelists describing what has changed; that they are recognized as contributing members to research and that they have become research experts, learning a new language and contributing to new ideas and the research ecosystem has shifted in this response to being more collaborative and is changing to more patient engaged, more diverse and more equitable. Overall, as a final point, the panel lauded OSSU as being the enabler for the key opportunities for patient engagement; being the backbone for providing the timing, support, and impact for patient-oriented research; and working to moving to a learning health system.

Addressing the State of the Art and Quo Tendimus

In a panel of OSSU’s Research Centres, moderated by Board Chair Frank Gavin, leaders reflected on how OSSU has worked to evolve the health research ecosystem. Dean Fergusson, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, described how patient engagement is now embedded into institutional governance and operations. Diana Urajnik, Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research, emphasized the distinct needs of northern and rural populations, and the tailored approaches needed to sustain engagement. Julia Abelson, Public and Patient Engagement Collaborative, called for deeper integration of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and evaluation frameworks that measure the quality and impact of engagement—not just its presence. John Lavis McMaster Health Forum, linked OSSU’s role to the broader learning health system and described how OSSU’s Masterclass and Nano courses are training a new generation of engaged equity-aware researchers, providers, and policymakers. Finally, Michael Schull, ICES, underlined the importance of connecting data science with lived experience, reminding the audience that relevant, patient-centred research depends on co-created questions and methodologies.

Advancing Research Through Strategic Partnerships

The final panel, chaired by Florence Dzierszinski, OSSU-supported researchers —Andrew Pinto, Lisa Hawke, Sarah Munce, Kristina Kokorelias, Christopher Canning, and George Foussias—showcased projects on mental health, co-design, primary care, HIV care, and forensic psychiatry. Each one demonstrated OSSU’s hands-on role in shaping meaningful engagement, knowledge translation, and system impact.

Closing Words and the Road Ahead

The event closed with remarks from Roger Farley, Chair of OSSU’s Patient Partner Advisory Council, who challenged the audience: “How will you work differently? How will you innovate your research through patient-oriented principles and values?”

As OSSU moves into its second decade, its partners—patients, researchers, policymakers—continue to shape a more inclusive, evidence-informed, and equitable health system.

Michael Decter, OSSU’s founding board chair, captured this sentiment:

“We built and launched an organization that brought researchers and patients together in a very different way… and communicated findings back to a broad audience of decision-makers, patients, and managers in the health system.”

To access the videos of the panel sessions from Research Day, click on the link here.