Project 465469

Hospital care consumes the largest component of healthcare costs in Canada. Despite the high costs, there is a lack of high-quality research evidence on the diagnosis and treatment of hospitalized children. To build a stronger evidence-base to improve outcomes for hospitalized children, we need to develop a research agenda outlining the health conditions that should be prioritized for research. One criterion that is used to prioritize conditions is the burden of illness on the healthcare system, which includes how costly and common (prevalent) conditions are. Another criterion is whether health inequalities exist, for example whether differences exist based on deprivation, rurality, and sex. However, recent Canadian data on burden of illness and health inequalities do not exist. Therefore, this study will use health administrative data to identify conditions based on cost, variation in cost, prevalence, and health inequality in children across Canada in all provinces and two territories from 2015/2016 to 2019/2020 using over 1.4 million hospital encounters. Findings from this study will be important to help prioritize topics for researchers, and funding agencies. They will also be used to create provincial and territorial report cards which outline conditions that are the most costly, prevalent, and with the greatest health inequalities in each region to help decision and policy-makers be informed, and identify areas that will need to be prioritized. We will disseminate findings broadly by working with our extensive national and provincial partners, which include health system decision-makers, clinicians, patients, and researchers. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to direct research efforts to areas of high priority to improve outcomes of hospitalized children and optimize the performance of the healthcare system.