Our three health organizations have selected sepsis and antimicrobial stewardship, two of the clinical care management (CCM) priorities mandated by the Ministry of Health, as a focus for the CST project.

Carla Gregor, CST executive sponsor (PHSA), is passionate about the benefits that these two clinical improvement priorities can bring to patient care.

“Our objective was to take advantage of the shared clinical information system we are building to accelerate our efforts in these areas and do things that haven’t been possible on paper.

“For example, we could use this technology to flag patients who may be at risk of sepsis so that we can provide them with faster intervention and treatment. We could also design the system to automatically alert a health care professional that an antibiotic they are ordering may put someone at risk of infection if overused.”

These two areas were selected as priorities by the Senior Executive Teams within our three health organizations and endorsed by the Project Steering Committee. They were chosen because of the extensive work already underway in these areas.

“By taking advantage of the infrastructure, in particular standardization and existing clinical practices, we can focus the effort needed, on behalf of our Health Organizations, to achieve leading practice in these areas,” explains Carla.

Sepsis and antimicrobial stewardship have been identified as priorities, but this does not mean that other clinical priorities will be ignored. Carla notes that CST design teams have been incorporating the needs of clinical care management into the design of the new system.

“It may just mean the difference between achieving leading practice in sepsis and antimicrobial stewardship and advanced or standard practice in some other areas at this time,” she says.

The first step will be to gain an understanding of how the design decisions already made will support these two priorities and to determine what additional work, if any, is required moving forward.

If you, or a member of your team, have expertise in these areas, you may be asked to participate as part of a key stakeholder group in the next few weeks. Your involvement is greatly appreciated.

Background information

• Clinical & Systems Transformation (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.

Visit CSTproject.ca for more information and regular updates, and to submit suggestions for future articles. If you have questions or feedback, please email info@CSTproject.ca or contact Kelle Payne, Executive Director, Transformation Lead (joint) at Kelle.Payne@vch.ca and Donna Stanton, Executive Director, Transformation Lead (joint) at Donna.Stanton@vch.ca