Congratulations to the 2025 Innovation Fund recipients!

Mina Tadrous

Large gaps often exist between the care patients should receive and the care they actually get. In asthma—the third most common chronic disease in adults—90% of patients have poor disease control. Computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSS) can help close this gap by delivering guideline-based recommendations directly into healthcare providers’ workflows.

Mina Tadrous, Assistant Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, was part of the research team that developed the Electronic Asthma Management System (eAMS), a CDSS that is now widely used in primary care settings. With pharmacists taking on a larger role in healthcare, Tadrous and his research teams have adapted this platform to build eAMS-Pharm, a CDSS specifically for pharmacists.

Jason Perepelkin

More than 6.5 million Canadians lack a primary care physician. The equivalent of 22,283 family physicians (44 million clinician hours) are needed to address this gap. Meanwhile, unpublished time and motion studies reveal that the traditional pharmacy workflow, conceived before the era of expanded scopes of practice, significantly limits the time community pharmacists can spend on tasks that require a pharmacist’s licence.

Research teams at the University of Saskatchewan and University of Toronto, led by Jason Perepelkin, Associate Professor at the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, will document the underuse of pharmacists’ clinical capacity and related inefficiencies. The goal is to catalyze community pharmacy’s transition to workflows that will unlock millions of clinician hours, thereby enabling pharmacists to collaborate with other providers and deliver evidence-based primary health care on a much larger scale.

Kerry Mansell

Saskatchewan pharmacists will soon be authorized to prescribe for diabetes—an advancement that’s part of a broader effort across Canada to improve access to care and meet rising demand for quality healthcare. While pharmacists have great potential to help address these challenges, this change marks a significant shift in roles and responsibilities. Success will also depend on the perceptions and expectations of patients and other stakeholders.

Starting in April 2026, a research team led by Kerry Mansell, Professor at the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, will work with 20 community-pharmacy pilot sites to explore the factors that support or hinder pharmacist-prescribing for diabetes care. The findings will also help refine the service before it expands across the province and offer valuable insights for other jurisdictions considering independent prescribing models.

Mark Makowsky

Pharmacists in community practice are increasingly providing consultations for patients with limited access to a physician. As this role grows, so does the need for pharmacists to demonstrate strong assessment and documentation skills to support sound clinical decision-making, patient safety and continuity of care.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced ambient “AI scribes”—tools that reduce the burden of documentation by converting complex consultations into clear, accurate notes. This one-year study, with funding from the Nashat Family Community Pharmacy Fund, will explore the impact of AI scribes during pharmacist consultations on the quality of both clinical assessments and documentation. It will be the first study to assess the use of AI scribes in real-world pharmacy settings.

Jill Hall

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common, debilitating condition. More than a quarter of people aged 55 and older report chronic knee pain and 40% of people assessed for knee replacement have not had prior appropriate care. Community-based pharmacists are ideally positioned to support early identification and support, and direct patients with OA to care by a physiotherapist.

Researchers from the departments of medicine, pharmacy, physical therapy and rheumatology from the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary will examine the clinical effectiveness and feasibility of pharmacists and physiotherapists collaborating to educate patients on self-efficacy, medication management and exercise. Beyond improved quality of life, anticipated long-term benefits include the reduced use of opioid medications.

Kenny Chan

Pharmacists are the first point of contact for medication-related questions. However, they may spend 15 minutes or more manually searching across multiple databases—including UpToDate, CPS, Lexicomp, Micromedex, Health Canada, FDA and RxFiles—to find accurate information that supports safe, effective patient care.

This project will pilot the Aiskyra AI Drug Info Assistant with pharmacists at North West Telepharmacy. The AI-powered conversational search tool delivers patient-specific, evidence-based drug information in under 15 seconds using Aiskyra’s curated database of more than 1 million trusted medical references, including Canadian clinical practice guidelines, drug product monographs and PubMed sources.

Catherine Biggs

Post-COVID-19, the use of telehealth to provide care has grown. While this model offers benefits such as greater efficiency, reduced healthcare costs and broader access for rural or underserved populations, it also presents unique challenges for healthcare workers in terms of work engagement.

Rates of burnout rose significantly among healthcare workers following the pandemic, which can negatively impact career satisfaction as well as patient outcomes. This study will assess the risk of burnout and factors that affect engagement among pharmacists providing care in three workplace settings: virtually, directly in person or in a hybrid model. Comparisons between the three groups will help understand the strengths and weaknesses of each workplace setting and how they contribute to employee burnout.