ICES@uOttawa Health Services Research Facility

ICES@uOttawa is a satellite site of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto. ICES currently has two active satellite locations - ICES@Queen's (opened in 2007) and ICES@uOttawa (opened in 2010). Two additional locations are currently under development at the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario.

Expanding the capacity of ICES
ICES satellite sites have been created to expand our capacity to generate high quality health services research at a province-wide basis. Satellite sites create an opportunity for scientists who wish to pursue research aligning with the ICES mission to access administrative data holdings at ICES from remote locations. This initiative has expanded the capacity of ICES to conduct research that contributes to the effectiveness, quality, equity and efficiency of health care and health services in Ontario by increasing the number of scientists and the breadth of scientific expertise.

History of the ICES Ontario Expansion
Under the initial agreement by which ICES received data holdings from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC) it was not possible to share the data with researchers outside of the ICES building on the Sunnybrook campus (now called ICES-Central). However, with the signing of a new agreement with the MOHLTC in 2005, ICES is now able to make the administrative health data available (under appropriate conditions) to scientists who work outside the Sunnybrook site. In the spring of 2006, ICES made a proposal to the MOHLTC as part of its renewal application that an ICES satellite site be established at each of the Ontario medical schools and the University of Waterloo. The MOHLTC endorsed the principles of increasing access to high quality data for researchers and building broader capacity for policy-relevant health services research and a plan to pilot this model at Queen's University in 2007 was established.