Using a combination of paid professional staff, studentships, students on placement terms and affiliated faculty, the practice centre is the ideal mechanism by which to train future generations of digital health professionals. Join us in creating opportunities to expose Canada's next generation of digital health professionals to the craft of their profession while delivering professional and practical solution to your organization.
Values
The Professional Practice Centre in Health Systems offers a unique value proposition to client partners.
- Innovation – we connect you with Waterloo’s pool of talent to solve your organization's specific problems and meet your specific workflow, research and management needs
- Flexible – because of our student resourcing model, we can easily ramp up and ramp down in capacity with a fair amount of agility
- Leading edge – with your permission, we are able to incorporate contemporary approaches emerging in research labs into projects
- Socially responsible – your organization can feel proud participating in the education and training of the next generation of digital health
- Excellent value – our cost structure is significantly less when compared to traditionally sourced services
- Development of highly qualified personnel - your organization has the opportunity to recruit University of Waterloo graduates who you come to know through Practice Centre activities
- Innovative procurement – funding opportunities afforded only to projects involving a university becomes available to your organization
How we can help
Engagement can take many forms, and is always tailored to meet your needs as a partner.
Full project leadership and design
You may have a project in mind where you know what the endpoint must be, but you are less certain about how to get to that endpoint. Or maybe you know exactly what must be done, but don’t have the horsepower internally to complete the project at the moment.
Projects like these are ideal for our practice centre. We form a steering structure with your team to provide project oversight and guidance, scope the project to address your deliverable needs, and then the practice centre manages the team and the deliverables to meet your requirements and timelines keeping you engaged at every step in the journey. You provide the learning problem/domain, and where appropriate, mentor students working on your project. Projects are completed on a cost-plus basis.
Practicum placement at your place of work
This route is perfect for organisations with established teams who are looking to bolster their talent pool with a Master of Health Informatics student for a short period of time (four or eight months) to work on a specific project under your leadership. We provide the talent. You provide the project and supervision. Consistent with Waterloo’s position on co-operative education, graduate students are compensated directly by you at whatever rate you would normally pay for equivalently qualified talent.
Practicum placement at our place of work
Ideal for projects that don’t require a multi-faceted team, and where your organisation doesn’t have the expertise or facilities internally to guide the project. You provide the project and we provide the supervision. One of our graduate students is assigned to your project and works together with faculty members and our professional staff to tailor and deliver you a value-added solution. Projects are completed on a cost-plus basis.