FEATURE REPORT: ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS — SEE PAGE 22 Publications Mail Agreement #40018238
CANADA’S MAGAZINE FOR MANAGERS AND USERS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN HEALTHCARE
VOL. 24, NO. 4
MAY 2019
INSIDE: PRECISION MEDICINE PAGE 18 INFRAM reaches Canada Markham Stouffville Hospital, north of Toronto, has become the first centre in the country to use the Infrastructure Adoption Model (INFRAM). The model has been adopted by HIMSS. Page 4
Rush to the cloud
Virtual house calls Physicians in Hamilton, Ont., have launched their own platform to provide telehealth services to patients who have trouble getting out of their homes to see a doctor. Page 10
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CAMH
Rush Health, in Chicago, is making the cloud its number one priority when it comes to information technology. Other large U.S. healthcare providers are also transferring applications to hosted systems, like Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. Page 8
CAMH promotes innovation with ‘Dragon’s Den’ CAMH, in Toronto, held an innovation day, complete with panels to assess the technologies produced by hospital teams. The ‘Dragons’, Dr. Catherine Zahn, president and CEO of CAMH, tech author and guru Don Tapscott, and Cisco Systems Canada president Rola Dagher, evaluated the proposals of six finalists chosen from 41 applicants. The top solution, a suicide safety plan app, was funded with $35,000. SEE STORY ON PAGE 7.
Hospitals are outsourcing and moving IT to the cloud BY J E R R Y Z E I D E N B E R G
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ORONTO – Demand for information from users inside hospitals – and from partners and patients logging into portals outside the facilities – is “becoming insatiable”, as one healthcare executive at Microsoft’s recent “Future Now” conference put it. So how will hospitals manage the rocketing growth of servers and apps, as new systems are added to deliver the data, along with the privacy and security issues that are bound to crop up? And it’s not just computers that have to be tracked. “What do you do when you’re keeping track of 5,000 desktop computers, and you move to monitoring 100,000 sensors,” asked Lydia Lee, Healthcare Lead at KPMG, and the former CIO of the University Health Network. She was the session’s keynote speaker, and noted that every computerized device in hospitals is now being tied into a network – or soon will be.
“It’s a quantum shift,” said Lee. “You have to respond in a different way.” Dr. Sarah Muttitt, VP and CIO at the Hospital for Sick Children, commented on the fast expansion of systems at the medical centre, which will only grow further with construction of a new tower for patient care. As well, the hospital has a leading-edge research centre, and has also embarked on a
“We’re looking to see what we can shift to the cloud,” said Dr. Sarah Muttitt, CIO at SickKids. new initiative in artificial intelligence. “Data is pivotal, and reliability is critical,” she said. One of the solutions is to outsource some functions to industry experts. As one example, she noted, the hospital has outsourced its network management and security to Telus. Now, it’s also looking to the cloud as a way of managing the many servers and applications the hospital has spawned.
“We’re looking to see what we can shift to the cloud,” she said. “We don’t want to be in the data centre business.” She said Sick Kids is now looking at every server, every blade, to see what could potentially be transferred to the cloud. “We’re spending the next year figuring it out.” She noted that Sick Kids recently went live with the Epic electronic information system in all of its departments, which has had a big impact on the hospital. Now every user, in every department, can access information across the organization, in the same way. “We were a siloed organization for decades,” she said. “The new system has been transformational.” She said that access to information is now vastly improved. “What we’re going to do with that information will also be transformational.” In particular, there’s a big emphasis on improving performance through the use of analytics – something she credited the hospiC O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2