Ontario hospitals are in the process of rolling out a software
suite that hopes to shorten wait times for key medical procedures,
including cancer surgery.
The initiative is part of the government of Ontario's wait times
reduction plan - a project being steered by Cancer Care
Ontario.
The first part of the system is a patient database, which is being produced by
Chicago, Ill.-based Initiate Systems Inc.
"The plan is each one of these hospitals has a patient database
or multiple patient databases, so we take those databases and we
load them into ours," said Scott Harper, senior vice president/GM,
Healthcare Practice, Initiate.
The loading of patient databases in Ontario together ensures
that there are no duplicate records, according to Harper.
"(It's) the part of the system that will help provide a source
of truth about patient information that is 100 per cent pristine,"
he said.
Accenture built the software for the wait times strategy and is
one of the vendors helping with implementation of the software in
the hospitals.
The actual wait times reporting software can then track the
surgical incident and the wait time in each area, according to Will
Falk, partner, Health and Life Sciences Practice, Accenture.
Falk said the software is a tool to schedule events like
surgeries, but it also has a reporting ability to show how long
wait times are progressing.
"Implementation has been going well so far, even though with any
IT system there are some bumps," he said. "It has been widely
accepted and embraced because people are happy that this problem is
being addressed."
But there is opposition to the new system by some surgeons,
according to Sarah Kramer, vice-president and CIO, Cancer Care
Ontario.
There has been a certain amount of suspicion from surgeons about why this
information is being collected, she said.
"Surgeons and doctors, generally speaking, have been in stand
alone practices where they don't feel part of the hospital
administration so this is a bit of shift," she said. "For the most
part this transition has gone well, but there is the odd case where
you find a difficulty and someone says 'you can't tell me what to
do, I don't work here.'"
Kramer said this initiative is important because until now
"health care is generally in the 1970s in terms of technology as an
industry and it's time to move forward."
"I think there is a lot of push not only to use this as a wait
times system but also to get surgeons connected so that we can
communicate with them other then snail mail," she said. "One of the
side benefits of implementation is that every surgeon will be
connected to the Internet, which surprised me to know they
weren't."
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