Ontario tackles ER waits with $109 million investment
Responding to challenges patients are facing in emergency rooms, the Ontario government is taking numerous coordinated steps to reduce wait times and improve patient satisfaction.
A major factor causing long emergency room (ER) wait times is the high number of alternate level of care (ALC) patients occupying acute care hospital beds, making it difficult to admit patients from the ER to hospital. ALC patients are unable to be discharged because the appropriate level of care they require is not always available. The Ontario government is making more of that care available. Ontario’s $109 million investment includes:
• $39.5 million for a Performance Fund targeting Ontario’s 23 poorest performing emergency rooms, IT enhancements and coaching teams to enhance hospital efficiency
• $38.5 million for increased home care personal support and homemaking services and enhanced integration between hospitals and Community Care Access Centres
• $22 million in new priority funding for Ontario’s 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) to invest in local solutions to further address ALC pressures
• $4.5 million for dedicated nurses to care for patients who arrive at ERs by ambulance to ease ambulance offload delays
• $4.5 million for new nurse-led outreach teams to provide more care to patients in long-term care homes to avoid transfers to the ER
McKesson acquires Vivalog
McKesson has acquired Vivalog LLC, a leading provider of Web-based solutions, including its MyPACS.net medical imaging reference site, that enable radiologists, cardiologists and other imaging specialists to efficiently organize and share image and reference case information needed during daily practice. This portfolio extends current hospital imaging and information management systems with reference case management and clinical conferencing capabilities that result in multimedia knowledge repositories to assist in diagnostics as well as research and training. By providing imaging specialists with instant access to related cases, the Vivalog system saves time by eliminating unnecessary steps. A fully integrated reference case management solution provides staff with faster access to their peers’ knowledge and an efficient way to capture and share their own evolving knowledge.
Tri-anim and Bound Tree Medical merge to create specialty healthcare distributor
Tri-anim, the largest U.S. specialty distributor of respiratory products and a leading distributor of emergency medical services (EMS) products, and Bound Tree Medical, the largest national supplier of EMS products, have merged to create the leading specialty distributor of healthcare products.
Tri-anim and Bound Tree have more than 60 years of combined experience in the multi-billion dollar EMS, respiratory and surgical markets. Together, the two companies provide more than 100,000 health care products to thousands of hospitals, surgery centres and emergency care providers throughout the U.S.
Joint CHUM/MUHC technological transition
To save time and money and maximize their efforts, directors at the CHUM and the MUHC are pooling their expertise and working jointly to replace source information systems for clinical data with new and more effective clinical information systems shared by the two hospitals. Known as the “technological transition,” this project was the subject of a symposium titled ‘The Digital Hospital: Between Interface and Face to Face,’ recently held at the Mount Royal Centre.
How will test results, medical notes and other clinical data be integrated into tomorrow’s patient records? How will clinical data stored in incompatible information systems be consolidated and made accessible to clinicians? How will hundreds of pages of paper-based patient records be converted and made available in the new electronic format? Experts from the CHUM and the MUHC must find answers to these questions in order to make this technological transition a success. Their challenge lies in finding a common platform for all clinical data and offering clinicians an overview of the patient’s situation.
Already used on most care units in the two hospital centres (CHUM and MUHC), the Oacis clinical information system (CIS) integrates clinical data on the patient and offers clinicians an overview of the patient’s condition. All health professionals are given a personal access code, and the user-friendly Oacis system helps them save time by sparing them the necessity of searching for information in different software packages.
While all of its applications are not yet available, the vast majority of health professionals from the two establishments have already adopted the system. During its deployment phase, the system will gradually offer an increasing number of technological options: in short, the best is yet to come.
