If Caroline Heisler arrived unconscious at Vancouver General Hospital’s Emergency Department, she would want their care staff to have her health history at their fingertips.

“I would want them to know I was recently at St. Paul’s Emergency Department because I had chest pains in the middle of the night,” says Caroline, Health Systems Planning Advisor with VCH’s Transformation team.

It’s a hypothetical scenario, but one that underscores the importance of the Clinical & Systems Transformation (CST) project.

“With the new shared clinical information system patients can take comfort in the fact that members of their care team have access to the same information, meaning they are able to make better informed decisions about their treatment.”

Providing a more complete patient record that is shared across VCH, PHSA and PHC is just one benefit of the project, which Caroline worked on for 15 months as Engagement Coordinator.

“Working with a project team comprised of such wonderful and talented people from all three Health Organizations was such an invaluable experience,” says Caroline, who recently made the difficult decision to take on a new role with the Transformation team under the Chief Financial Officer at VCH.

One of Caroline’s responsibilities is to support staff engagement and teamwork within the Chief Financial Officer’s department. Whether it’s a staff forum, workshop or other project, she helps facilitate work across teams that don’t often get the opportunity to interact.

Although Caroline is not directly involved in patient care, she feels that the work she does “behind the scenes” helps support it.

“Every day, we are each doing what we can to work towards the best healthcare system possible,” she says, adding that CST is also bringing people together, with staff from the three Health Organizations working collaboratively to transform our healthcare system.

The project strikes an even more personal chord for Caroline. Her mother recently underwent a blood transfusion at a Lower Mainland hospital, but the physician wasn’t initially aware that she needed certain antibodies in her blood, something that her mother had mentioned on previous visits. It was a little concerning for her. With CST this situation might have been prevented.

Caroline feels CST will support safer, more efficient care through standardized, evidence informed clinical practices and a seamless electronic medication management process.

“You know the right patient will get the right dose at the right time. That’s extremely valuable.”

Background information

•  CST is a joint initiative of VCH, PHSA and PHC, and one of the largest and most complex healthcare projects in Canada. It spans across several areas of the continuum of care, including: acute care inpatient and outpatient units and ambulatory care. As well as creating consistent, leading practices, and a shared clinical information system, CST will deliver HIMSS Level 5 functionality.

•  Clinical design teams, made up of hundreds of highly-skilled, multi-disciplinary professionals from across the three Health Organizations and Team IBM (experts from IBM Technical Services, Deloitte, Leidos Solution Builders, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre), started work on April 7, 2014. These teams are tasked with designing our future workflows, based on leading practices. In doing so, they are defining the requirements for our new clinical information system.

For more information, please contact Donna Stanton, CST Executive Director/Transformation Lead, VCH – donna.stanton@vch.ca