Webinar Wednesdays bring valuable content to Digital Health Canada members weekly.
Presented every Wednesday from noon to 1 pm EST, each webinar features a presenter from the public or private sector sharing details of a successful project, innovative ideas, or new practices. Webinars are moderated and include a short Q&A at the close.A Digital Health Canada member benefit, these webinars are occasionally open to the public. See a complete list of Webinar Wednesdays below. Webinar Wednesday attendance counts toward earning CEUs!
Upcoming Webinars
MayMay 23: Privacy in Healthcare: A Proactive Approach
May 30: No Webinar Due to eHealth Conference
Past Webinars
Digital Health Canada Members can download and review past webinars here. Downloads are free for Digital Health Canada Members. Non-members: join Digital Health Canada and download any of these past webinars for free.
Michael Seiferling, Subject Matter Expert, Saskatchewan Health Authority-This presentation will describe how LOCUS, a clinical decision support tool was used to create a standard report for client care. This report includes a “level of care” recommendation that is used to match a client to a specific service menu. This allows for a reliable and consistent service offerings for all clients based on level of need.
Patricia Rothney, Business Analyst/Project Manager + Clinical Subject Matter Expert, Gevity and Margie Kennedy, Managing Partner + Clinical Informatics Practice Lead, Gevity – The purpose of this presentation is to discuss the interprofessional priorities emerging from the connected care movement. Clinical priorities from four specific perspectives will be discussed in this panel, including acute care reconfiguration, public and community health collaboration, pharmacy and medication management, and clinical leadership and policy.
Saurabh Ingale, Data Quality and Standards Expert at Cancer Care Ontario will present on:
- How Cancer Care Ontario’s data and analytics strategy influenced standardization of data quality practices in the organization
- An overview of CCO’s Enterprise Data Quality Management Guideline that defines data quality processes, templates and roles & responsibilities to consistently manage quality of data.
- Share learnings from the implementation of the guidelines and use of technology to manage quality of CCO’s data assets
Mervat AbdelHady,Transformation Specialist, Humber River Hospital- Roadmap and roadblocks to implementation of Meditech 6.1 Surgical Services module to support fully electronic ordering and documentation in surgical prescreening, preoperative, operating room, post-anaesthesia care unit, same day surgery and labour and delivery. The goal is to streamline all patient records under one interoperable platform, thereby improving clinical information access and quality patient care.
Amos Adler and Linda Kaleis, MEMOTEXT- Founder, Amos and Lead Data Sciencetist, Linda discuss using data science to drive digital patient engagement and deliver stakeholder ROI
Marc Mycyk, Association of Ontario Health Centres– Delivering patient care intelligence to providers at point of care dramatically improves screening rates and accelerates the advances of QI practices. The Community Health Centre’s investment into Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities returned incredible advancements for improved client centred care. Centres and providers are able to proactively ensure their patients’ complex care needs are understood and addressed with clinicians who can make informed decisions from their EMR using these enhanced BI reporting tools. This session will demonstrate how providers and organizations are benefiting from using business intelligence to improve primary care services.
Margot Wilson, Director of Chronic Disease Management, Providence Health Care & Garey Mazovita, Clinical Professor, UBC Faculty of Medicine- The RACE model is a multi-specialty telephone hotline providing FPs with timely access to a range of specialist consultation services. FPs can call one number, choose from a selection of specialty services, and be routed directly through to the specialist’s cell phone for advice, usually within a few minutes. The program has grown to include >30 specialties, has logged over 35,000 calls, and has spread from a local to a provincial service.
Anne Forsyth and Isabel Tsui, CIHI- CIHI provides comparable and actionable data and information to accelerate improvements in health care, health system performance and population health across Canada. The Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) and National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS) are two of CIHI’s highest volume and most commonly used data sets for planning and management purposes in the health care system.
As the health care data landscape evolves to become increasingly integrated and interoperable, CIHI’s pan-Canadian data holdings will evolve in tandem to ensure relevant and timely data can continue to be made available for planning and management purposes. This presentation will discuss how investments made in eHealth/digital technology can be leveraged to access near real-time data and the role data standards play in this work
Simeon Kanev, Association of Ontario Health Centres– The session will demonstrate the approach taken by AOHC in providing a much needed privacy support to its member organizations. AOHC’s educational outreach program includes multiple components that will be reviewed in more details to give the audience an idea of how this can be done with maximum impact and limited resources. Some interesting statistics will be shown to illustrate the actual impact the program has on member organizations and their staff in making them more privacy and security aware
Lori Moran, eHealth Centres of Excellence, Based out of the eHealth Centre of Excellence in Waterloo, Ontario – the System Coordinated Access (SCA) Program is supporting patients and clinicians with processes and technology to enable more appropriate referrals and faster access to health care services. As part of this work, an Innovation Procurement process was used to select an Ontario based vendor consortium to design and implement an electronic referral (eReferral) solution for the Waterloo-Wellington region. Following the successful completion of a Proof of Concept phase, which included an evaluation by a third-party consultant, the decision was made to move forward with expansion of the eReferral solution. With this decision in place, seven other LHINs which were listed on the RFP had the option to expand the eReferral solution into their local areas without additional procurement in a relatively accelerated and coordinated manner. Recognizing this as an opportunity to support the key priority of reducing wait times for specialist care, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has provided one-time, multi-year funding to the SCA Program to support the roll out of eReferral in two separate streams across eight LHINs.
Jason Min, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia- Commercially available electronic medical records (EMRs) are physician-centric and not aligned with pharmacist logic or documentation needs for clinical and collaborative practice. Pharmacists in primary care increasingly rely on EMRs to support patient care. The Pharmacists Clinic team at the UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences has been working with a software specialist to design, build or modify, and implement new modules in the OSCAR EMR to address the needs of pharmacists and other interprofessional allied health members. The many clinical, administrative, and workflow lessons learned from a pharmacist perspective will be discussed.
Gina Palmese and Irene Lemmermeyer, OntarioMD- Roughly 80% of community-based physicians in Ontario have adopted EMRs in their practices, but adoption alone doesn’t guarantee they will realize the full benefit of the technology. In this presentation, we demonstrate how OntarioMD’s EMR Practice Enhancement Program (EPEP) works with practices to improve their EMR proficiency and data quality to achieve better outcomes for patients. Pre- and post-data from case studies reveal improvements in capacity to help patients co-manage their health, for example, by using data analysis to identify populations for nutrition counselling, prevention, screening, and immunization. We are also beginning to address other critical health system issues, such as opioid prescribing and mental health. Going forward, EPEP will leverage our EMR Physician Dashboard (currently in Phase 2 pilot) to help physicians monitor their patients against indicator sets developed by our health sector partners (such as HQO’s Primary Care Performance Measurement Framework and AFHTO’s Data 2 Decisions Framework).
Heather Harps, TELUS Health – Presentation on Home Health Monitoring
CW. James King MSc, MD, FRCPC, Chief Medical Information Officer & Consulting Pediatrician, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario- – During implementation of an integrated enterprise-wide EMR we designed a program to maximize clinician adoption through optimization of end-user experience. Using Human Factors methods we studied clinical workflows and developed guiding principles for hardware selection, placement and configuration around clinician to computer, patient to computer and clinician to patient interactions. These guiding principles were proactively applied to ensure situation awareness was maintained and to support end user workflows through, for example, easy access to the EMR while allowing providers to maintain proper computer workstation ergonomics and line of sight with patients and families. These guiding principles have broad applicability for an EMR implementation and can be deployed in an interactive manner by most healthcare organizations.
Ewan Affleck – Canada’s best-kept e-health secret may be the successful deployment by the Northwest Territories of a patient-centric single charting system for all health services in the jurisdiction. Presenter Ewan Affleck has worked and lived in northern Canada since 1992. He is the long-serving Medical Director of the Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority and Clinical Director of Family Medicine at Stanton Territorial Hospital. A digital health information systems expert, he pioneered the implementation of an enterprise electronic medical record system in the Northwest Territories. He is passionate about developing sustainable health services for northern communities. A member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Medical Association and a faculty member of the University of Calgary, he maintains an active clinical practice, teaches, and provides both hospital-based and community services. In 2013 he was appointed to the Order of Canada for his contribution to northern health care.
Jon Develing, NHS Wirral – In the previous operating model in the Wirral, a small peninsula opposite Liverpool, England, the health and care organizations worked in silos to deliver services to residents, whose life expectancy varied by almost 12 years within a mere 1.5 miles. This session describes the complex challenges in overcoming this situation and the progress in improving outcomes, despite a tough financial environment for the NHS. Please note the Audio is corrupt for the first 4 minutes of the recording but then is corrected.
Andrew Schroen, Women’s College Hospital – Learn how implementation and post-live strategy contributes to activation rates and portal use by patients. Understand how the availability of patient portal services, marketing efforts, and provider uptake directly affected patient activation and use outcomes.
Susan Anderson and Chris Hobson, Orion Health (Chairs of the COACH eSafety Community of Action) – Join the Digital Health Canada eSafety Community of Action in discussing “eSafety for Patients” and the eSafety Survey.
Keltie Jamieson, Nova Scotia Health Authority –The Nova Scotia Health Authority formed in 2015 from 9 district health authorities. At the same time the Province implemented a shared service model dividing technical and infrastructure services and clinical application enablement and support. The Nova Scotia Health Authority Information Management & Technology (IM/IT) department supports clinical applications across the province.
Etienne O’Connor, Strata Health –“Over 20% of seniors might be inappropriately admitted to residential care in Canada and may have been able to remain at home with appropriate supports that match their needs” (CIHI, 2017).
View this webinar with Etienne O’Connor, Registered Nurse, MScN, MBA, from Strata Health, to review key CIHI study highlights, explore how digital health is addressing this challenge, and appreciate some key lessons learned from Canadian and international jurisdictions.
Blair Witzel, MD+A Health Solutions – We have all heard or even experienced procurements that have failed to meet the clinical or administrative needs of an organization. Common belief is that the reason for this failure is that the system requirements were not clear or prescriptive enough. However, in reality the challenge with requirements is that they are often overly prescriptive and undermine vendors ability to propose innovative approaches to solving the clinical or administrative needs. This webinar examines outcomes-based requirements as an alternative approach to defining requirements and specifications, and how they can be used as part of a procurement process to encourage innovation.
Devon Haag, Program Manager, BC centre for Disease Control –As the health care system increasingly turns to digital strategies and innovations for improving public health, it’s important to understand the effectiveness of these new approaches. This webinar will use GetCheckedOnline, BC’s online testing service for sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections, as a case study for a digital public health intervention. The presentation will explore the origins of GetCheckedOnline and assess the impacts of the service within the public health sphere.
Derek Ritz, Principal Consultant, ecGroup Inc – In Canada, as in many OECD countries, digital health has been identified as a way to help “bend the cost curve”. We need to improve efficiencies so that we can deliver care for all at a price our society can afford to fund. But what are the economics that drive decision-makers in low and middle-income countries (LMIC)? Can a business case be made for investing in digital health, even in the face of resource shortages? The answer might surprise you! (hint… see: http://lifeequationinteractive.com/)
Keith Whelpdale, Analyst, eHealth Process Optimization, Alberta Health Services – In preparation for a provincial clinical information system the Alberta Health Services (AHS) Chief Medical Information Office has been tasked with determining how AHS needs to transform its operations and practices in order to successfully leverage our investment in a provincial CIS. A number of Strategic Transformation Questions (STQ) have been posed and are actively being worked on to determine our desired future state. As you would expect each STQ has relationships to and dependencies on other STQ resulting in a spider web of interdependencies in the STQ process. We have developed a process and tool for drilling down through this spider web to provide clarity as to what is known and what remains unknown within those dependencies for question leads, working groups, and executive decision makers. We have found that a visual representation of the relationship is very helpful in fostering understanding. This webinar will share the tool and show how it links to other sources of information.
Dr. Erin Keely and Dr. Clare Liddy, Champlain BASE – Access to specialty care remains a major challenge in the Canadian healthcare system. eConsult services allow primary care providers to seek specialist advice often without needing the patient to go for a face to face consultation. The Champlain BASE eConsult model is a managed service which incorporates several key components that are essential to its success. The BASE model includes strong clinician leadership, strategic engagement of specialists and PCPs, using speciality groups rather than individual specialists, collection and communication of feedback to providers and tracking of key quality indicators. We will present the model and its impact, describe our evaluation strategy using the quadruple aim framework and share different strategies that have been used to implement the BASE model across Canada.
Karen Tulk, Western Regional Health Authority – In a review of paramedicine reports for the Western Newfoundland region, it was identified that a significant portion of the transfers for long-term care centre residents were related to urgent or emergent care. A position paper was developed to explore the financial and emotional burden, as well as the impact on the quality of care and quality of life associated with these transfers and consequent wait times for long-term care residents requiring emergency services. This Webinar Wednesday presentation provides a summary of the paper, including information gathered through a literature review and networking with colleagues in the areas of telehealth, emergency services and long-term care. The presentation also includes a historical overview, a summary of the benefits and uses of telehealth for long-term and emergency care, as well a summary of identified challenges and facilitators.
Samina Abidi, Medical Informatics, Dalhousie University – This webinar will present “DWISE” framework that assess a primary care practitioner (PCP)’s readiness and self-efficacy to administer behavior change interventions to patients with diabetes and that of patients to accept and comply with these interventions. DWISE provides personalized self-management plan to promote behavior modification in patients with diabetes to achieve better diabetes control.
Leon Salvail, Gevity Consulting Inc. and Lynsey Turchet, MD+A Health Solutions – This webinar explores the CHIEF discussion paper of the same name. Across Canada, there is a pervasive vision for integrated, patient-centred care that connects patients & their health information to care providers, & care providers to one another across the entire health continuum. This vision, while attainable, is dependent on the coalescence of several factors, including funding sources and models, policies of various health bodies and effective technology implementation and sustainable management. The CHIEF paper was developed to spark discussion, rethinking and exploration of new sources of funding, skilled resources and new mechanisms for implementing and managing health IT projects. In particular, the paper presents a conceptual model for Public-Private-Partnerships (P3) to support the identification of various bundles of assets and services that could be included in a health IT P3 arrangement. It also identifies opportunities & challenges, through an analysis of seven case studies.
Sebastien Roy, Senior Managing Partner, Gevity Consulting Inc. – Quebec’s Ministry of Health & Social Services has adopted a novel telehealth governance model that aims to overhaul how telehealth is planned and managed in the province. This webinar presents the new governance model, its context and objectives and implementation plan. The new model’s impact on telehealth teams and technological trends is also presented to encourage a reflection on the evolution of the role of telehealth teams within the Canadian healthcare system.
Irene Blais, Director, Funding Unit, Cancer Care Ontario – Cancer Care Ontario (CCO), an Ontario government agency, drives quality and continuous improvement in disease prevention and screening, the delivery of care and the patient experience, for cancer, chronic kidney disease and access to care for key health services.
Dave Wattling and Cynthia Zhang – This webinar explores how achieving a successful P3 arrangement relies equally on arriving at the optimal P3 structure as well as facilitating necessary changes in the health industry – vendors (private sector), government and hospitals – to enable effective and productive partnerships. Interviews conducted with stakeholders across the health industry identified four key themes that are essential for effective P3 partnership – sustainable funding, effective governance, partnership and trust, and better outcomes
Angela Dosis, Director, Digital Strategy, CIHI – Summary: Reshaping how our clients work with us to establish a digital environment driven by customer engagement, focused on delivering integrated informationwhere customers can independently interact with high quality data that informs decisions which enable sound policy, effective management and improved health outcomes.
Stephen Saunders, Senior Executive Consultant, Global Health, CGI – Explore evolving trends in clinical genomics. This Webinar Wednesday includes selected use cases that demonstrate the need to significantly re-imagine the use of health IT capabilities and the impact on health IT architecture. Use cases include Thyroid Lesions, Cervical Cancer, Childhood COPD, Clinical Bacteriology and Poly-Prescribed patients. They exemplify the role of clinical genomics in oncology, public health, rare disease treatment, outbreak control and drug efficacy review respectively.
Rodney Burnes, Association of Ontario Health Centres – A robust Consumer Heath-‘e’ Strategy – achieving positive health outcomes for clients and providers enabled through technology – is one of the new strategic directions embedded within the Association of Ontario Health Centres (AOHC) 2015-2020 Strategic Plan. Research has shown that collaboration technology, when effectively implemented, can lead to increased efficiency, improved client outcomes and experience. AOHC, along with some of its members, have participated in a few pilot projects demonstrating those outcomes in practice. Key learnings include the need to consider human behavioural and social factors that provide easy to understand education and physiological assessment tools that influence decision-making and health outcomes. This presentation will take you through our journey in this new and exciting path of demonstrating the use of technology in client care.
Julia Peters & Dr. Peter A.J. Bascom, eHealth Ontario – This presentation covers eHealth Ontario’s experience applying best practices from COBIT 5 and other industry resources to revise its internal governance structures that cover the enterprise – everything from strategic investment decisions through to approving a change to the electronic health record (EHR) production environment. The presenters share tools and processes that others can apply to evaluate existing governance structures and design new ones. It concludes with some lessons learned and an open discussion.
Marcy Antonio, BSc, MPH, PhD student, University of Victoria; Judy Bandsmer, BSN, BSc, MS, Island Health; Olga Petrovskaya, RN, PhD (c), University of Victoria; Kara Schick-Makaroff, RN, PhD, University of Alberta
- describes patients’ and nurses’ responses to the use of ePRO data in real-time;
- identifies strategies for use of tablet computers in clinic settings; and
- discusses the implications of these findings for clinicians and researchers.
Susan Berezny, The Ottawa Hospital – This presentation focuses on The Ottawa Hospital Collaborative Privacy Proof of Concept (PoC) & White Paper development process. It involves testing a set of use-cases through a subscription service, that proactively brings visibility to privacy breaches using a Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) technology that can work across all applications, in the context of Paladion’s HealthCareSOC community model.
Gavin Tong, Associate Managing Partner, Gevity – HL7’s latest standard is reaching the top of the Gartner Hype curve because of early evidence of its ease of use and ability to solve certain interoperability challenges. US vendors are investing heavily in it and it’s time for Canada to pay attention to these developments.
David Denov, Deloitte – Digital technologies are changing traditional dynamics between various stakeholders in health care and impacting the way the way patients and providers interact. These technologies are emerging first through “experimental” innovation and lead by nontraditional (external) players – ex. life sciences and digital innovators, specifically looking to address emerging expectations and gaps in health care delivery. Emerging social and technology trends are also creating pockets of digital innovation within the healthcare system that are beginning to gain traction, and informed and empowered consumers are expecting care and solutions that are coordinated, convenient, customized, and accessible. This presentation will explore how digital technology and patient engagement are transforming health and social care.
Kara Erlandsen, Stibo Systems Healthcare – From patients to providers, claims to administration and marketing to customer service, data is generated daily from every corner of your healthcare organization. Each unit has its own processes and systems that support this delicate ecosystem, yet this data is prone to a myriad of errors that could be fatal. Transforming your data will drastically improve your quality of care and result in patient safety and satisfaction, a connected Care Team, interoperability and increased profitability. Please join Stibo Systems Healthcare to learn how you can start the journey to enterprise-wide data quality with Multidomain Master Data Management.
Kelsey Flott, Research Fellow, Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) & Erik Mayer, Consultant Surgeon, Imperial College Healthcare Trust – “Digital maturity” is the extent to which digital technologies are used as an enabler to deliver a quality service. Digital technologies are providing new mechanisms for accessing personal medical records, reporting patient safety incidents and communicating across care settings. They provide an opportunity to depart from traditional service arrangements, overcome geographical boundaries and reconfigure services around the patients and their needs. However, digital technologies need to be monitored and evaluated to ensure they operate in a way that cultivates these patient-centered outcomes. Extensive literature exists about how to assess the components of digital maturity, but it has not been used to design a comprehensive evaluation framework. Subsequently, the metrics that do exist are limited to evaluating digital programmes within a single service or care setting, meaning that digital maturity evaluation is not accounting for the needs of patients across their care pathways. This study sets out to answer ‘How can evidence about best-practice in digital systems be leveraged to create an holistic evaluation framework to assess digital maturity?’ Furthermore, it aims to understand ‘how can a digital maturity evaluation framework capture information across patient care pathways?’
Michael Cardy, Chief Technology Strategist, Red Hat Canada – Digital technologies are promising to transform the way healthcare is delivered. New mobility solutions change the patient and clinician experience and many new sources of data are arising from wearables and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. There are many data challenges that must be overcome to prepare for this transformation – Today’s HI access many different sources of data in unconnected silos. To liberate the data and share internally and with external parties, next generation integration approaches can leveraged to bridge the gap. Please join Michael Cardy, Chief Technology Strategist, introduce and explain how data management can be liberated and consumed by new digital healthcare applications.
Dr. Harold Lopatka, Executive Director, Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada (AFPC) – AFPC is the voice for the academic pharmacy in Canada. Dr. Lopatka is responsible for the AFPC project to develop a pharmacy education e-resource on informatics & communications technology & a pharmacy educator network for integrating informatics into curricula. Dr. Lopatka was also responsible for writing the proposals for both the e-Resource and the Peer Leader Network.
Elizabeth Keller, Vice-President, Product Strategy & Delivery, OntarioMD; Pritma Dhillon-Chattha, Provincial Director, eQuality and eSafety, Alberta Health Services; and Peter Bascom, Chief Architect, eHealth Ontario – The Digital Health Canada eSafety Guidelines are now in active use! Hear from key stakeholders share their use experiences and lessons learned, and find out about available opportunities for you to engage in working on the next edition of the Guidelines!
Darren Larsen, Ontario Medical Association – Over the past year, the OMA has explored a data analytics strategy called Insights4Care (i4c). It seeks to extract data from electronic medical records (EMRs) in community practice, run it through decision support engines and, in near real-time, provide individualized feedback to participating doctors regarding decisions that could or should be made to improve patient care now or over time. This is a strong tool for quality that supports the mature use of EMR systems and improves the data held within by providing a window into the knowledge and wisdom that can be derived from health data in ways that were never before been possible. Dr. Larsen presents an update to progress in this innovative body of work, explaining how technology companies and associations can work together for a common interest. He also highlights why the medical profession is perfectly positioned to provide leadership in this space.
Mike Burgoyne, Ricoh & Shaun Brown, nNovation LLP – As the amount of healthcare data skyrockets, so do data privacy and security risks. Not only can privacy and security breaches damage your organization’s reputation and compromise patient relationships, but they can also result in major costs. While many healthcare organizations have considered how they protect their core IT infrastructure, most don’t properly consider the risks associated with breaches related to other devices that transmit, store and print patient information. Join us for an overview of health information security risk in Canada including recent legal developments, tips on how to start protecting your patient’s data immediately and an interactive Q&A with the speakers.
