Laura Desveaux

Dr. Desveaux is a scientist and Director of the Learning Health System Leadership Center at the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners. She is a Senior Fellow with AMS Healthcare, an Assistant Professor with IHPME at the University of Toronto, and a 2023-24 Leadership Fellow with the International Women’s Forum. Dr. Desveaux’s program of work focuses on learning health systems, the future of leadership, and high performing organizations and teams in healthcare. Her expertise in behavioral science tackles healthcare’s most persistent problems by examining what drives behaviors, how and why things work, and identifying how context influences success (and failure). Her core This approach provides insights into how to effect change at both individual and system levels. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Women Who Lead, a not-for-profit dedicated to supporting the career advancement and leadership development of women in the health sector.

I pursue collaborations with health system decision-makers to bridge the research to practice gap through the design of pragmatic evaluations of health service initiatives. Through partnerships with provincial, national, and international stakeholders, we focus on the principles of learning health systems, whereby the needs of the health system and the population its serves are prioritized and evidence is continuously communicated to relevant stakeholders. This approach to health services research is what drives impact across our work and ensures our research is positioned to support timely, evidence-based decision-making.

Research Interests:

• Health System Leadership
• Learning Health Systems
• Implementation Science
• Behaviour Change
• Complex Interventions

My program of work draws on behavioural psychology and implementation science to design and evaluate interventions that address complex problems. To achieve this, my team examines the process and mechanisms of change, as well as the contextual factors that characterize success (and failure). This approach provides insights into what works best, for whom, and in what circumstance and helps to inform opportunities to scale up successful solutions across the system.