Since April 2014, hundreds of highly-skilled, multi-disciplinary healthcare professionals from VCH, PHSA and PHC have been providing their expertise to the Clinical & Systems Transformation (CST) project as members of clinical design teams. They asked of themselves and others: How can we help patients receive the best care and the most positive experience as they go through the health system?

Teams went above and beyond to answer this important question. They gathered information, reviewed current workflows, designed for future needs, made decisions about streamlining care and supporting delivery, and defined requirements for the new, integrated clinical information system. While some team members will now return to their home organizations full-time, others will stay on with CST to work on testing and transformational learning activities.

“As we transition into validation and testing, the CST project is one step closer to achieving its vision – thanks to the tremendous dedication of the staff and physicians who worked so hard to complete a huge volume of design work, while learning all about the new clinical information system we will use,” says Rebecca Hahn, CST Chief Transformation Officer and Program Director.

“It was amazing to see the design teams in action – with clinicians from across our three organizations working together to ensure future workflow will be safe, streamlined, and evidence-based.”

Highlights

We have countless examples of important transformational work coming from our design teams. One example comes from the Medication Management Team. They worked with experienced clinicians and providers from across the three Health Organizations to come to a consensus about how the new medication prescribing, distribution and administration process will work, and to make sure our new clinical information system will safely support the process.

Bradley Ho, the team’s Manager, says one of their biggest achievements was building clinical decision support tools for use when a provider is placing medication orders and a pharmacist is verifying these orders.

“These tools include allergy and drug interaction checking, dose range checking on high-risk medications and alerts when drugs excreted through the kidneys are ordered for renally-impaired patients,” explains Bradley. “Without provider computerized provider order entry (CPOE), this would not be possible.”

Sabina Deol, Senior Scheduler and Associate Lead for the Patient Scheduling Team, says her team successfully engaged with over 600 scheduling experts through workshops and design sessions.

The accomplishments continue with the Emergency Team.

“Our group standardized discharge documentation and incorporated General Practitioner and patient voices into developing emergency department patient discharge summaries,” says Cynthia Startup, Emergency Team manager.

The Patient Registration Team members are proud of their achievements as well. Darlene Ridley, team Manager, says active integration with the Ministry of Health’s Enterprise Master Patient Index (EMPI) – the source of truth for patient identification – will bring many benefits.

“It will promote positive patient identification, auto-populate some demographic fields to save clerks time and help prevent the creation of duplicate medical record numbers (MRNs),” she says.

What’s next?

Design validation and testing are the next steps for the CST project.

Design teams will visually validate within our new clinical information system, that the data they provided and the workflows they designed have been captured accurately. This process allows them to answer the question, “Is it what I expected based on the requirements we outlined and the decisions we made?” Design validation will also promote quality and standardization across design teams and modules.

Once validation is complete, the project will move into comprehensive clinical and technical testing to ensure that the new system is robust, fit for purpose and adheres to safety and quality guidelines.

Team members who were engaged in the design phase will take part in testing the system, using clinical scenarios based on approved design decisions. Stay tuned for more information about validation and testing in future articles, coming soon on CSTproject.ca.

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.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. Kellé Payne, CST Executive Director/Transformation Lead, VCH (Joint) – kelle.payne@vch.ca
Donna Stanton, CST Executive Director/Transformation Lead, VCH (Joint) – donna.stanton@vch.ca

You’re invited to submit suggestions for future articles. If you have questions or feedback, please email info@CSTproject.ca