Meet Arun Radhakrishnan
I am a family physician with a focused practice in chronic non-cancer pain and the father of two busy young children who keep me on my toes and challenge me to find a happy and healthy balance between work and my family. I completed my undergraduate medical school training at McGill University and then moved to the University of Toronto to complete my post graduate training in family medicine. More recently, I completed a Master’s degree in health services research with a focus on knowledge translation and eHealth at the Institute for Health Policy Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto.
Over my years in practice, I have had the opportunity to work in a variety of different primary care settings (urban to rural, academic to community) in different regions of Ontario and have seen many of the challenges that face our health care system such as sustainability, efficiency and effective patient-centered practice.
Inspired by my father, I have had a long standing interest in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their application in the health care system particularly to support the translation of various forms of knowledge. This interest guided my focus during my master’s degree. That, in combination with my observations about challenges to the health care system, led me to study how primary care roles could be optimized by the use of ICTs for knowledge translation.
Within the theme of knowledge translation, I have enjoyed opportunities as an adjunct Assistant Professor with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto to teach and develop educational curricula for undergraduate & post graduate medicine, graduate studies and for continuing professional development.
I also have an interest in developing, implementing and evaluating innovative health care system solutions using knowledge translation tools and ICTs to address some of the challenges I think our system faces. In that capacity, I have had the opportunity to be the current co-chair for the Collaborative Mental Health Network and the Medical Mentoring for Addictions and Pain Network that seeks to use ICTs and knowledge translation tools to optimize the roles of nearly 800 primary care clinicians. The opportunity to work with the CEP as one of the clinical leads on the development of tools for the Knowledge Translation in Primary Care Initiative was a natural fit for my interests and I believe is one that helps to address important health system challenges.
– Arun Radhakrishnan, MSc, MD, CM CCFP, CEP Clinical Lead