Liisa Jaakkimainen

Current academic appointment/faculty rank: Professor 

Affiliations:  

• Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto 

• Senior Core Scientist and Program Lead, Primary Care and Health Systems, ICES, Toronto, ON 

• Co-Lead, Primary care Ontario Practice-based Learning And Research (POPLAR) network 

• Staff Family Physician, Sunnybrook Academic Family Health Team 

Research summary:  

Dr. Jaakkimainen’s research focuses on primary care health services research, initially using health administrative data to examine primary care health care access, continuity of care, primary health care indicators and benchmarks. In 2006, Dr. Jaakkimainen co-lead the "Primary Care in Ontario: An ICES Atlas". More recently, Dr. Jaakkimainen uses family physician (FP) electronic medical record (EMR) information linked with health administrative data to develop measures of primary care wait times and care coordination. In 2014, she published the first Canadian study using FP EMRs linked to administrative data to measure the time between a family physician’s referral and the appointment with a specialist physician. Currently she is using Natural Language Processing using FP EMRs to identify disease conditions and "codify" unstructured information for research. Dr Jaakkimainen's research also includes health services research to support persons living with dementia and older and frail populations.     

Dr. Liisa Jaakkimainen is a family physician at the Sunnybrook Academic Family Health Team. She a senior core scientist and program lead of the Primary Care and Health Systems program at ICES and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation. Dr. Jaakkimainen is also the Enhanced Skills Clinician Scholar (Research) Program Director with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Research Synopsis

Dr. Jaakkimainen’s research interests include examining primary health care access, continuity of care, primary health care indicators and benchmarks, measuring wait times from primary to specialist care, improving the coordination of care in primary care, caring for marginalized and frail seniors in the community, and performance feedback to primary care providers. In 2006, Dr. Jaakkimainen co-lead the "Primary Care in Ontario: An ICES Atlas". In 2014, Dr. Jaakkimainen published a study using family physician electronic medical records linked to Ontario health administrative data to measure the time between a family physician’s referral and the appointment with a specialist physician.

Honours and Awards

Name:
Description:

North American Primary Care Research Group, PEARL Award, April 2017

Department of Family and Community Medicine - University of Toronto, Award of Excellence in Research (Senior), 2018

Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM)-PSI Visiting Scholar, 2019-2020

Grants

Agency: Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Operating Grant
Project Title: Measuring wait times along the pathways of care in primary care
Funding Awarded: $448,802.
Funding Period: 07/2013-03/2019.
Principal Investigator: RL Jaakkimainen
Co-Investigators: J Barnsley, S Bronskill, DA Butt, LM Del Giudice, J Durbin, RH Glazier, NM Ivers, K Tu, RE Upshur.
Knowledge Users: E Keller, CA Leaver, JD Tepper.

Agency: CIHR- CNODES.
Project Title: Replication of the CNODES High Potency Statin in the development of incident DM and Chronic Renal Disease study
Funding Awarded: $150,000
Funding Period: 03/2016-06/2019
Principal Investigator: L Jaakkimainen
Co-Investigators: M. Griever, F Sullivan, D Henry

Agency: Public Health Agency of Canada
Project Title: Validating Administrative Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia team
Funding Awarded: $300,000
Funding Period: 11/2017-03/2020
Principal Investigator: L Jaakkimainen, L. Lix
Co-Investigators: D. Butt, A. Katz, K. Reimer, M. Smith, J. Widdifield

Agency: Cancer Care Ontario -Clinical Programs & Quality Project
Title: Identifying breast cancer pathways of care from family physicians electronic medical records
Funding Awarded: $100,000
Funding Period: 04/2018-03/2019
Principal Investigator: L Jaakkimainen
Co-Investigators: L DelGiudice, K Tu