By Dr. Radica Bissoondial
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They are done by a team of people,”
Steve Jobs
Upon being asked by the team at Digital Health Canada to consider writing an article for their 50th Anniversary, the initial thought process was to assimilate content on a historical map of digital healthcare. However, sharing the same age of Digital Health Canada at 50, the final decision was to adapt and pivot to my changing mind. Subsequently, this article will focus on what I believe to be a key competency of today’s digital health workforce— collaboration. This expansion will be shared from two perspectives—myself as a professor and myself as a facilitator of Digital Health Canada’s Live Learning Series.
In the first perspective, I am a Professor and the Program Coordinator of Fanshawe College’s Health Systems Management post-graduate program within the School of Information Technology. This program aims to provide knowledge and skills to existing healthcare professionals with the abilities to function within a digital healthcare workforce. Over the years of being aligned to this program, one of the greatest successes of our graduates outside of the knowledge that is provided within the curriculum is the skills development that is obtained from collaboration. Of course, the definition of collaboration is the situation of two or more people working together to create or achieve the same thing (Cambridge University Press & Assessment, 2025). From an academic program perspective, this collaboration begins in the classroom between students and faculty and students and students. Yet, over the growth of the Health Systems Management program, the collaboration is more realized when there are opportunities for key community partners who function within the digital healthcare space to share their processes and practices to the students. This tend to be as guest speakers and experiential learning opportunities. With this collaboration, the students are given the ability to see how the learned content translates to their future practice setting. The associated benefit of this has been an increase in confidence of the students, networking between students and future employers, and exposure to opportunities that would be unknown or limited.
In the second perspective, I am a facilitator of Digital Health Canada’s Live Learning Series, facilitating ‘The Canadian Healthcare System’ sessions. After facilitating this session for three deliveries, in addition to the content being discussed, the one area of the session that enhances the content is the collaboration among the attendees. In fact, with the attendees coming from different areas of digital healthcare roles and responsibilities, practice settings as well as geographic regions (primarily Canada), collaboration allows attendees to listen and share stories of applications and experiences in their journey of digitalization or digitalization applications. In some of the sessions, this collaboration has resulted in attendees committing to connect outside of the session to learn and apply best practices. Yet, still, another outcome from this collaboration is for attendees to know that something new or innovative or difficult has been done and the learning curve has resulted in positive outcome or change.
In relating these two perspectives to Digital Health Canada, as a leader in the digitalization of healthcare over the past five decades, Digital Health Canada should continue to connect, inspire, empower and advocate all with the foundation of providing collaboration for all its associated stakeholders. If anything, the collaboration will validate the quote by Steve Jobs whereby great things are not done independently but as a team.
Dr. Radica Bissoondial, BSc, MEd, MHA, DHA
Professor and Program Coordinator
Health Systems Management
School of Information Technology
Fanshawe College