Residents of Burlington now have digital access to medical and social services through the new Burlington Health Navigator app.
The new app, launched this week by the Burlington Ontario Health Team, offers 24/7 access to several services including mental health, palliative and end-of-life care, chronic disease management, women’s health and parenting services, older adult care, and more.
“The Burlington Ontario Health Team (OHT) today announced, during Digital Health Week in Canada, the official launch of a mobile app that provides 24/7 access to localized healthcare and social services in Halton. The Burlington Health Navigator app is the first of its kind province-wide that an OHT has created that offers a single access point to a wide variety of community providers,” they said in a statement released on Tuesday.
The Burlington OHT is a collaborative team of Burlington health and social service organizations working together to integrate these services to better meet the needs of Burlington and the surrounding area. You can find the full list of members and collaborators here.
The app also assists people in finding a family doctor or hospital care, home care, social connections, and access to Indigenous and LGBTQ2S+ resources.
This will hopefully lead to better patient and provider experiences, better coordination of care and improved health outcomes for the community.
Residents can also find the same information on the Burlington OHT’s recently re-designed website at burlingtonoht.ca.
Development of these new resources began back in the spring of this year but have been in the works since before the pandemic. The Burlington OHT has been working with a development team that consists of patient partners and members of the Community Wellness Council, who helped guide the OHT with their own wisdom and know-how.
Having patient partners involved early on in the process helped to ensure that the app would meet the needs of the public. It was important to the OHT that the personal perspectives of patients were considered to help make it more accessible to the community.
One such patient partner is Chloe Gallagher, who has been heavily involved in the OHT since 2019 and sits on the aforementioned Community Wellness Council (CWC).
Gallagher suffered from an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) rupture when she was just 15, which then lead to a hemorrhagic stroke and having to be put into an induced coma after undergoing an emergency craniectomy.
While dealing with such extensive medical issues at a young age definitely took their toll, they also brought about a lot of positive outcomes.
“I would say it also gave me a purpose,” she said. “It led me down the path that I’m on now. It’s led me to become a patient partner with the OHT. It’s led me to pursuing an undergrad in digital health. It’s led to this overwhelming passion for healthcare, for patient experience, for changing the healthcare system. I am very passionate about taking the positive and negative experiences I’ve had over the years to help others.”
Gallagher, a Burlington resident her whole life, is also the vice-chair of the CWC and has been able to help provide insight as someone who has had experience dealing with the healthcare system.
She has been involved in the development process for the app and website from the very beginning and was at the table when the OHT was discussing how they would be laid out and what programs and services would be made available.
“When we went about discussing and planning what would be on this app, we looked at important aspects and services within our community that were frequently accessed, that we knew people accessed,” Gallagher said.
The most surprising aspect of this whole process for Gallagher was finding out that there were resources and services in the area that she didn’t know about, which really is the purpose of the app.
“It kind of opened your eyes to the purpose of this work. Because if I feel that way, then there’s so many other people within the community that might just be thrust into this system that truly need the help of this.”
The app is available for download in the Google Play and Apple App stores.
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Kyle Marshall is a recent graduate of Centennial College’s journalism program and a current sports journalism grad student. He has most notably done work for the 2 and Out CFL Podcast, Camp Pages magazine and The Hockey News. You can find him on Twitter @TheRealKJM.
