2021 Clinical Innovator of the Year: Dr. Antonio (Tony) Meriano

Dr. Antonio (Tony) Meriano, Chief Medical Information Officer – TransForm Shared Service Organization

Dr. Meriano has a passion for leveraging digital health tools to enhance patient care for clinicians. He continues to provide leadership in this capacity and has been recognized as an enabler of clinical innovation within the region.

Through a monumental clinical transformation implementation, Dr. Meriano was instrumental in encouraging interconnectivity of digital health/virtual health systems between health care providers and across the continuum of care through his tenacious advocacy of implementing a regional HIS across four hospitals (six sites) to provide one single patient record across the region. This record is now the single source of truth for information on this patient within the region. He also advocated for the implementation of contextual launch to ‘Clinical Connect™,’ which facilitates the incorporation of community results into the HIS system.

As a result of his passion for digital health adoption, Dr. Meriano was recognized by his colleagues as the lead in the HIS clinical transformation project for the entire region. Through his work he was able to help standardize care and increase efficiencies in the health system on a regional basis.

Dr. Meriano continues to encourage the use of digital health/virtual health tools to improve health outcomes, education, access, efficiencies, quality and patient safety. The successful implementation of this system has provided efficiencies, better decision making and benefits for patient safety (e.g. closed loop med administration, CPOE), including the implementation of Dragon medical one which will significantly improve immediate physician dictation as well as legibility of notes, resulting in fewer errors and increased patient safety. Under his advocacy and leadership, the four hospitals have greater than 80% CPOE adoption and 100% Dragon Medical One Adoption (front end dictation).

Learn more about the Digital Health Canada Awards here.