Enabling Connected Care with a Person-Centred Data Foundation.

Having the right information at the right time and at the fingertips of the right individuals is not just a necessity for a well-functioning healthcare system but it is also the difference between life and death for Canadians. It is particularly critical to enable improved access to and quality of care for equity-deserving individuals because these data eliminate blind spots for clinicians, policy makers and system planners. The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the health data challenges that exist across Canada and the tangible impact those have on the healthcare system's ability to meet the needs of underserved populations. It sparked unified urgency at the federal and provincial/territorial levels to build a learning health system powered by connected health data for clinical care, patient access, care organization operations, health system use and population/public health. Person-centric data content standards will lie at the foundation of Canada's learning health system, enabling the creation and exchange of data.

The impact of university provided nurse electronic medical record training on health care organizations: an exploratory simulation approach.

Training providers appropriately, particularly early in their caregiving careers, is an important aspect of electronic medical record (EMR) implementation. Considerable time and resources are needed to bring the newly hired providers 'up to speed' with the actual use practices of the organization. Similarly, universities lose valuable clinical training hours when students are required to spend those hours learning organization-specific EMR systems in order to participate in care during clinical rotations. Although there are multiple real-world barriers to university/health care organization training partnerships, the investment these entities share in training care providers, specifically nurses, to use and understand EMR technology encourages a question: What would be the cumulative effect of integrating a mutually agreed upon EMR system training program in to nursing classroom training on downstream hospital costs in terms of hours of direct caregiving lost, and benefits in terms of number of overall EMR trained nurses hired? In order to inform the development of a large scale study, we employed a dynamic systems modeling approach to simulate the theoretical relationships between key model variables and determine the possible effect of integrating EMR training into nursing classrooms on hospital outcomes. The analysis indicated that integrating EMR training into the nursing classroom curriculum results in more available time for nurse bedside care. Also, the simulation suggests that efficiency of clinical training can be potentially improved by centralizing EMR training within the nursing curriculum.

An evaluation of health information technology outsourcing success.

Outsourcing involves contracting out functions performed by an organization to another organization. Many healthcare organizations are exploring outsourcing as a way to address demands for health information technology (HIT). This study researches the success of outsourcing in the health informatics industry in Canada. The study is designed to help understand whether outsourcing four functions of HIT (i.e. development, implementation, operations, and maintenance) can prove successful for an organization. Findings demonstrate that outsourcing these four functions occurs in Canada; however, the research from the semi-structured interviews finds that operations and maintenance may be more commonly outsourced in Canada, over development and implementation functions. Despite this, findings from this research suggest that outsourcing development and implementation may offer more benefits and fewer challenges than outsourcing operations and maintenance. The research also finds that there can be benefits of outsourcing, such as gaining access to expertise and improving service levels. A weakness of outsourcing may be that internal knowledge is lost and having to manage the change required from outsourcing. The study proposes that there are many factors that need to be considered when outsourcing to ensure it is successful.

Clinical support in primary and ambulatory care: Canadian lessons to be learned from the UK patient Summary Care Record (SCR) initiative.

There is an increasing requirement for interdisciplinary teams to share patient data to ensure optimal care. Healthcare providers in all settings from Emergency Medicine to long-term care management need access to patient information. In the UK, developments to address the need for information sharing have uncovered issues that the Canadian eHealth establishment would do well to heed when undertaking its own initiatives.