Hospitals have been challenged to meet the needs of the ageing Canadian population, particularly as the number of people living with multiple chronic medical conditions is rapidly growing. The COVID-19 global pandemic has placed an additional strain on hospital care, resulting in dramatic restructuring of hospital services that has had system-wide effects.
The GEMINI Hospital Cohort Study will collect data from hospitals across Ontario to better understand medical and intensive care patients, describe the quality of their care, and identify opportunities for quality improvement. Importantly, this study will serve as a platform to study COVID-19, the effects of the pandemic on patients with non-COVID illness, and inform the response to the pandemic at the clinical, hospital, and system levels.
The GEMINI Hospital Cohort Study will build on the well-established, privacy-compliant, and highly secure data collection, transfer, deidentification, quality control, standardization, storage, and analysis processes developed by the GEMINI team in order to create a Hospital Analytics Laboratory. The focus of the GEMINI Hospital Cohort Study will be patients cared for by any medical (e.g. general medicine, respirology, cardiology, etc.) or intensive care service in hospital because patients hospitalized for COVID-19 illness will almost entirely be cared for by these services.
The GEMINI Hospital Cohort Study will have immediate local impact by characterizing patients with COVID-19, describing the effects of the pandemic on patients hospitalized with non-COVID illness, and exploring associations between organizational aspects of hospital care on clinical outcomes. The GEMINI Hospital Cohort Study will be a globally unique research environment with rich data to harness advanced analytics, population coverage in a diverse setting permitting generalizable insights, linkage to longitudinal datasets, leveraging Ontario’s strong existing administrative data infrastructure, and a focus on knowledge translation to ensure that research findings directly translate to clinical practice, hospital operations, and system-level planning.