Sathya Karunananthan

PhD

Investigator

Assistant Professor
Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa

About:

Sathya Karunananthan holds a PhD in epidemiology from McGill University. She is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa and Investigator at the Bruyère Health Research Institute.

Her research in health services focuses on improving access to care for older adults with complex health conditions, such as dementia, frailty, chronic pain, and Parkinson’s Disease. She investigates disparities in care access among underserved communities, specifically linguistic minority and racialized groups. She studies the impact of health technologies like electronic consultation and artificial intelligence on inequities in access to care and health outcomes. Her work in meta-research examines how research is conducted in order to identify potential sources of bias, raise awareness of them, and advocate for practices and guidelines that minimize these biases, ensuring that scientific findings are both robust and reliable.

Karunananthan’s research takes an integrated knowledge translation and exchange approach, involving key knowledge users, including persons with lived experiences, health care providers, health administrators, community organizations, and policy makers throughout the research process. She works in interdisciplinary teams, using advanced quantitative methods for the analysis of large health administrative and survey data, as well as mixed methods and evidence syntheses.

Her research program has been supported by funding from a variety of sources including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the uOttawa Brain and Mind Research Institute (uOBMRI), the Brain-Heart Interconnectome (BHI), le Consortium National de Formation en Santé (CNFS), Innovations Strengthening Primary Health Care Through Research (INSPIRE-PHC), the Community Health and Social Services Network (CHSSN) and the Alzheimer Society of Canada.

Research Interests:

Access to health services, equity, language as a social determinant of health, health administrative data, mixed methods, integrated knowledge translation, evidence synthesis.

Select Publications:

Karunananthan S, Bonacci G, Fung C, Huang A, Robert B, McCutcheon T, Houghton D, Hakimjavadi R, Keely E, Liddy C. (2024). What do primary care providers want to know when caring for patients living with frailty? An analysis of eConsult communications between primary care providers and specialists. BMC Health Services Research.

Lee SH, Gibb M, Karunananthan S, Cody M, Tanuseputro P, Kendall CE, Bédard D, Collin S, Kehoe MacLeod K. (2024). Lived experiences of palliative care physicians on the impacts of language and cultural discordance on end-of-life care across Ontario, Canada: a qualitative study using the intersectionality-based policy framework. International Journal for Equity in Health.

Hakimjavadi R, Karunananthan S, Fung C, Levi C, Helmer-Smith M, LaPlante J, Gazarin M, Rahgozar A, Afkham A, Keely E, Liddy C. (2023). Using electronic consultation (eConsult) to identify frailty in provider-to-provider communication: a feasibility and validation study. BMC Geriatrics.

Hakimjavadi R, Karunananthan S, Levi C, LeBlanc K, Guglani S, Helmer-Smith M, Keely E, Liddy C. (2023). Electronic consultation use by advanced practice nurses in older adult care – a descriptive study of service utilization data. Nursing Open.

Karunananthan S, Grimshaw JM, Maxwell L, Nguyen, PY, Page MJ, Pardo Pardo J, Petkovic J, Vachon, B., Welch VA, Tugwell P. (2023). Can a replication revolution resolve the duplication crisis in systematic reviews?. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

Contact:

skarunan@uottawa.ca