By Event Correspondent Vaishnavi Kurakula, Masters in Digital Innovation (Health Informatics) Student at Dalhousie university

Keynote presentation: Digital health literacy and all technology-enabled practices by Dr. Krista Jangaard and Dr. Christy Bussey

The healthcare data journey from an individual patient to CEO of IWK health took almost 25 to 26 years. She spoke as a physician who saw the implementation phase from paper charts handwritten, overlapping lab results in one binder transform to database research- code appropriate, writing appropriate information using nova scotia database is a boon and the family patient’s information is linked but extracting was a boon. The extraction took time which led to the digitalization of the equipment to get the data from all over the province in a standard way for making the provider’s life easy as well for education purposes. The database is still not efficient, its time consuming to extract correct data, and administrative clearance to help with population-based research is needed.

Dr. Christy Bussey shared her medical journey as a speech therapist to physician and mentioned that challenges, we have challenges with getting good data to begin with. Three things we need to remember are to have

1. Open and comfortable conversations
2. Change management
3. Change the relations between clinicians and IT.

One Patient, One Record (OPOR) is for future care and has tons of data which is not synthesized right we’ve got a bunch of data that is synthesized by different information systems with they don’t talk to each other where we have data that we’ve accumulated but we’re still using humans to actually sit there and look at it and do it all right manually and really this is about increase alluded to this the patient’s health care journey. This is an attempt to bring team members together and use technology to drag information so we can improve access and flow rate that’s important and it is getting done through equity, diversity and inclusion and research and innovations. Artificial intelligence we love that so this is another step in thinking and being aware of what’s happening in the world around us. Important considerations about engaging patient and clinician perspectives are Engaging patients with the important information, implantation of who owns the records, the balance of standardization and collecting the information that can be standardized. Having control means being open, listening, and being able to make decisions for continuous improvement.

Cyber security and digital literacy in health care: balancing security vs functionality by Dr. Paul Charife and Dr. Lindsay Bertrand

We’ve got to protect our assets and protect the data protect our patient’s data In order to do that we have to have to work ‘Better Together’ to make sure that this gets done. The greatest risk is in knowing the risks exist but doing nothing about it. Dr. Paul started developing the principles that can lead to security success:

1. Culture. Changing culture is difficult. The key thing is senior management needs to support cyber security, from healthcare to functionalities that improve culture.
2. Collaboration
3. Transparency
4. Empowerment
5. Expertise
6. Convergence
7. Privacy

Collaborate better, break transparency, understand risks, and work better together. Cyber awareness training is important in order to be more interactive.