2004 C.I.P.A. Winners
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University Health Network (UHN)Web-based application enables easy sharing of patient information between clinicians, labs and hospitals, smoothing the way for improved service and reduced costs.
Patient Results Online (PRO) is a Web-based application that gives clinicians at a number of Toronto hospitals, including the University Health Network and Mount Sinai, shared access to patient information. A recent MDS Inc. partnership further enables these clinicians to access test results from MDS community labs across the province using the same system. University Health Network (UHN) encompasses three hospitals located in downtown Toronto – Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and Princess Margaret Hospital – as well as Toronto Medical Laboratories. Its oldest site, Toronto General Hospital, has been providing services to the community for more than 165 years. Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) began treating patients in 1923 and is now a 462-bed, patient-care, teaching and research hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto. MDS is an international health and life sciences company that provides enabling products and services for the development of drugs and the management of disease. MDS Diagnostic Services is a leading provider of diagnostic laboratory services in North America. Challenges Healthcare is often delivered in "silos" with limited information exchanged among different care providers. This can adversely affect patient outcomes. While MSH and UHN have integrated clinical programs and MDS labs perform high volumes of laboratory tests for UHN and MSH patients, sharing patient information effectively was often difficult between these organizations. Objectives The main objectives of PRO were to provide clinicians with an integrated, single point of access to patient information stored within UHN, MSH and MDS information systems, and to facilitate appropriate service delivery in the community while optimizing acute-care service capacity. Solution PRO is an intuitive, Web-based application that allows authorized clinicians to view patient results through a common, secure and seamless user interface. Developed in consultation with the Ontario Privacy Commissioner’s Office to ensure appropriate privacy policies and protections, clinician implementation has been overwhelmingly positive and cost savings are being realized in health records departments. Authorized clinicians who log into the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) at MSH or UHN are provided with a PRO link. When this link is selected, a request containing user context and patient context is sent to the PRO application, which uses this patient context to query a patient registry storing 2.6 million records. Patient matches from each facility are displayed. Once patient matches are determined, PRO queries the three facilities’ databases for patient results using the respective hospital’s patient identifier and provincial health card numbers. Results from these queries are displayed in a single consolidated list of results from each database. Innovative Use of Technology PRO facilitates patient-centred care through novel, secure information technology. As an alternative to traditional approaches to systems integration that involve replicating data from one system to another, PRO performs real-time queries of individual systems and returns the results of these queries to the clinician’s health information system (HIS). For the clinician, the ability to launch PRO from his/her own organization’s HIS is highly efficient since it eliminates the need to toggle between multiple applications and requires virtually no user training. PRO does not require common vendor platforms across participating organizations to link disparate databases. Finally, PRO supports the existing clinical workflow, rather than requiring redesign — a truly value-added approach to supporting clinicians with innovative technology. PRO facilitates timely access to information, thus allowing resources to be appropriately focused. In some cases, patients may never need to return to a hospital if physicians can access test results online from other organizations. Finally, the opportunity to proactively divert patients to appropriate acute-care programs at different organizations is also facilitated. The technology does not limit the amount of information shared nor the number of organizations sharing. Future plans networks in the Greater Toronto Area. A 2004 CIPA Winner! For its exceptional and innovative application of Information Technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, the University Health Network was awarded a 2004 Canadian Information Productivity Award of Excellence in the Customer Care category.
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