The rest of the story: Algonquin’s Social Innovation Lab powers COVID research

April 9, 2020

The Ottawa Citizen recently published a story on a local researcher, Dr. Dayre McNally from CHEO, who just completed an important research study on potential decontamination using UV light on N95 masks that are so important in protecting front-line healthcare workers.

Here at the Social Innovation Lab (aka SLiDE) we know and admire Dr. McNally and his important contributions as a clinician, scientist and innovator at CHEO. You see, he is a partner on one of our most successful applied research technology projects, a software platform (insightScope) that was built entirely by Algonquin students. insightScope dramatically accelerates the process of completing systematic reviews in healthcare. The platform reduces review times from months and years to days and weeks and has been validated and used by leading research groups. To date, the platform has been used for over 50 systematic reviews with 310 participants, including 220,000 assessments completed. Of particular note, there are currently four COVID-19 related systematic reviews on the platform related to the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) crisis.
And that research study that was the subject of the recent Citizen article? It was performed on the insightScope platform built by our students, and is now being disseminated to the global community (Manuscript available on OSF Pre-Prints at https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/29z6u).

Now you know the rest of the story.