ll

JULY NEWSLETTER

Are you a clinician who has experienced positive results with ClinicalConnect or Hospital Report

Manager (HRM), and would like to share your experience? If so, we would like to invite you to

participate in a BR case study. Please contact: ted.alexander@lhsc.on.ca

We have also have a GREAT NEW VIDEO on our BR case studies, which you can find here.

The connecting South West Ontario (cSWO) Program, funded by eHealth Ontario, has a team of benefits realization (BR) specialists putting together case studies that illustrate both the clinical and organizational value of digital health tools – such as cSWO’s Regional Clinical Viewer, ClinicalConnect™.

The cSWO Program’s planned investment in developing a BR program started in 2014. “We wanted to create a framework that would help us to better understand how digital health tools could impact workflows in different organizations across the continuum of care,” explains Ted Alexander, cSWO’s Manager, BR. “The development of case studies helps us to determine how clinicians are using the tool to produce better outcomes.”

To produce a case study, the specialists ask clinicians who have adopted the digital health tool to consider how it affects clinical and/or organizational production within their workflow. The team then researches best practice literature and supporting metrics to supplement the clinician’s experience, essentially marrying the research to the clinician’s testimonial.

These studies are now being integrated into the change management and adoption (CM&A) strategy; when meeting with organizations who are interested in deploying ClinicalConnect, the CM&A delivery partner (DP) will present a case study that shows how another clinician in a similar workflow is using the tool to enhance the delivery of care. “The benefits realization work allows us to share information with other health care organizations as they work to implement best practices,” notes Lori-Anne Huebner, BR Lead, cSWO Waterloo Wellington CM&A DP at the Centre for Family Medicine Family Health Team eHealth Centre of Excellence. “And if you look at the literature, you’ll find that clinicians are more apt to adopt a process if another clinician is advising them to do so.”

cSWO’s Benefits Realization Shows Value of Digital Health Tools

For a more in-depth article on Benefits

Realization work, with an example of a case

study, check out the July cSWO newsletter!

ll

The eHealth Centre of Excellence System Coordinated Access (SCA)

program is working to foster coordination and communication

between health system partners by establishing a regional electronic

referral solution that will bring pre-existing referral processes into a

secure, online shared environment where information can flow and

be distributed across the continuum of care.

In a collaborative effort, the SCA program partnered with the

Waterloo Wellington Community Care Access Centre (WWCCAC) and

the Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integrated Network (WWLHIN) to secure an electronic referral solution using an

out-of-box approach to procurement. Funded by the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services (MGCS),

innovation procurement methods were used to select a vendor capable of designing the technological platform that

will support a first-of-its-kind electronic referral system.

“We felt we needed a new and different process to find the right partner, a partner that can work with us to build a

system that is sustainable for our marketplace and is able to introduce innovation as the solution scales,” explains

Sharon Baker, Director of Innovation Procurement. “We’re creating something to achieve certain identified

outcomes, and it’s something that’s going to be evolving as both technology and the healthcare system changes. So our

evaluation process and criteria had to include innovative components in addition to traditional evaluation criteria.”

Innovative Procurement Process Used for SCA’s Electronic Referral Solution

A Message from eCE Director, Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia

Continued on next page

When we established the eHealth Centre of Excellence (eCE) over two years ago,

one of our visions was to create and support solutions that would enable better

communication within the healthcare system. As we all know, the healthcare

system has a lot of moving parts, from acute, to primary, to community care — and

it can be hard to make connections between them. Here at the eCE, we’re working

on digital health programs that will help clinicians from different healthcare

organizations communicate with one another easily, quickly, and securely.

Communication is the key to breaking down any silos that may exist within

different sectors, enabling us to work together to best support our patients’ needs

as they make their journey across the spectrum of care.

We also rely on you, our system partners, for your feedback as we develop and

enhance these programs to suit your clinical and organizational workflows. In this

newsletter, you’ll see the results of some of this feedback — from our Benefits Realization work with the cSWO

Program, to the procurement evaluation team for the upcoming electronic referral solution, to the testimonial for

Project QBIC 2.0 from a local family doctor. We understand that without your support, we can’t do what we do. So

please, keep reaching out. Your input is valued.

Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia

ll

“By using new and innovative approaches, you create the opportunity for new and innovative solutions,” says Lori

Moran, Project Manager of the SCA program. “A large part of the success of this procurement is thanks to the RFP

evaluation team’s incredible hard work and commitment to upholding the integrity of a truly innovative procurement

process that has, in turn, produced results we are all very proud of and excited to share.”

What made this innovation procurement process unique?

The pre-procurement phase included a number of steps where we engaged the vendor community to assess

market interest and capacity to respond to an RFP (request for proposals), and to seek vendor input on our

vision and process. Members of the procurement team, which included representation from the SCA program,

physician community, WWCCAC, WWLHIN, Community Support Services and other system leaders across the

region, partnered with Communitech (the innovation hub in Waterloo Wellington) and the Information

Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) health committee to design two days of facilitated engagement with

large and small vendors which helped us to understand the market and create interest in what we were doing.

The evaluation phase included a number of innovative components:

Points were given for innovation capacity using a tool designed by Dr. Ken MacKay from the University of

Waterloo, which not only evaluated the vendors’ capacity for innovation but provided insight into the

potential fit between the SCA project team and the vendor teams.

The top two vendors emerging after the first five stages of evaluation were invited to compete in a design

contest as the final evaluation step. The “contest” involved three 3-hour meetings with each vendor,

during which they were asked to simulate a rapid-prototyping design exercise and develop a solution

mock-up. This turned out to be extremely valuable to the overall evaluation and really allowed us to see

how ideas on paper translated into real life products and delivery styles.

STAY TUNED: The SCA program hopes to be announcing the chosen

vendor within the next few weeks.

Questions? Please contact SCA Project Manager Lori Moran:

(226) 336-9885, ext. 227 lori.moran@ehealthce.ca

Continued from previous page

ll

If you would like to receive this and other newsletters from the eHealth Centre of Excellence, subscribe at

http://ehealthcentreofexcellence.com/subscribe

The Centre for Family Medicine FHT eHealth Centre of Excellence

Williamsburg Town Centre, 623-1187 Fischer Hallman Road, Kitchener, Ontario

226-336-9885 | communications@ehealthce.ca | ehealthcentreofexcellence.com

We’re on twitter! Follow us @eHealthCE

Project QBIC 2.0’s eHealth Coaching Gets Two Thumbs Up From Family Doctor

To sign up for eHealth coaching sessions, contact QBIC

Project Manager Danika Walden:

519-804-9470 x608 danika.walden@ehealthce.ca

The main issue with EMR is that as physicians, we often don’t know what we don’t

know regarding the EMR system. The initial assessment by QBIC personnel guided us

to learn what tools are available to aid in our everyday interaction with patients. Simple

instructions, which have cut down our technical time, creates more time for patients. For

example, the Toolbar providing easy access to commonly used applications reduces the

time searching for these necessary items and thus, reduces interruption to patient

interaction. In addition, custom forms direct our patient care to evidence-based medicine.

We can use this information to give feedback to our patients and their progress in chronic

disease management. Prior to having eHealth Coach support, my EMR was mainly used

for just recording patient encounters. I’m sure there is a wealth of more information that

would help us to use our system to even greater effect.

- Dr. Julie Wilhelm, Family Doctor, Waterloo ON

“

”

Project QBIC (Quality Based Improvements in Care) 2.0 has been designed to support primary care clinicians to improve

how they use their electronic medical records (EMRs), with a focus on Chronic Disease Prevention and Management

(CDPM). During FREE training sessions, Project QBIC’s eHealth Coaches can offer tailored support to increase workflow

efficiency, enhance CDPM within your EMR, help you to accurately identify patients with specific chronic diseases, learn

more about chronic disease clinical indicators and how they can support long term actions for patient care, and user-

friendly CDPM templates into your EMR that are based on current best practices. Here’s what one local family doctor

has to say about her training sessions: