Project 465789

Medly is an electronic health program which can help patients and providers better manage heart failure. Heart failure is an extremely costly disease, both to patients and health systems. Part of heart failure treatment is staying with medication recommendations and monitoring diet and exercise. Medly assists with the management of heart failure by making communication between patients and providers easier and collecting important patient information for fast review. Medly has had success in large, urban hospitals by improving patient outcomes and streamlining provider management. Medly has been chosen for deployment in rural settings within Ontario, to address the gap in specialist care available to rural Ontarians. Deploying Medly within rural communities requires careful attention to rural characteristics and traits. Rural healthcare is different than urban healthcare, however existing health policy does not account for that. The adoption of Medly by rural healthcare networks will be guided using theories and methodologies from other rural health deployments. Important information about Medly deployment strategy within a rural community will be shared with other communities interested in future deployments of Medly and other electronic health innovations. Further, lessons learned from the adoption of Medly in rural Ontario can help establish ways to deploy other digital health programs in similar settings. To accomplish this, data regarding ongoing Medly deployment in rural Ontario will be analyzed through a rural health system perspective. Following this, further analysis of contextual facilitators and challenges to Medly deployment - such as models of care - will be conducted on previously completed Medly adoptions. Using the information from in-progress and completed deployments, and guidance from rural specific methodology of electronic health adoption, a comprehensive framework will be developed and distributed for future digital implementation efforts.