Neil Gardner, CIO Saskatchewan Health
Barry Rivelis, CIO BCPHSA and VCH
Bill Trafford, SVP Alberta Health Services
Bill was presented via video. I originally thought they meant via VC, but it was in fact a pre-recorded video of Bill doing his presentation in a boardroom.
Bill stated some of the key issues today being treatment based on episodic rather than continuous methods, a more patient centric and accessible world of data and knowledge, and shrinking workforce in health services.
What Bill claims is needed is to move to model that meets these demands in a two pronged approach with a focus on health systems improvements and leveraging of information technology to provide contiguous, secure, realtime access to patient and practitioner information and the enabling of personal health plans.
Bill tells us that Alberta has all the components to enable this today, and the solution is a connected provider community that empowers patients.
Neil Gardner agreed with Dan about some of the drivers for change in health systems, focussing on an aging population that is driving the need for major change to ensure sustainability. Neil noted that the healthcare workplace needs to see changes to ensure professionals are attracted and retained to enhance care, teamwork, and a culture of patient centric wholistic care. Better information empowering transparent and accountable decision making at all levels in healthcare is cited as a strong case for BI.
Care processes, quality, and patient safety are noted as important aspects of healthcare that we are on the cusp of being able to deliver though LEAN, MedRec, and use of care teams.
Current investments in info structure are making a difference today, and will continue tomorrow. Neil stated that greater integration of back end data for health system use to support health system planning and evaluation is an important area to focus.
Neil noted that taking our IT governance and support processes to the next level around system availability, integrity, data quality, business engagement, and identity management are key future initiatives to be architecting in the next year.
Increasing costs, limited budgets, and importance of increasing value create an environment where western provincial alignment and engagement of partners is vital to succeed in these initiatives.
Barry has the honor of being the last person speaking at the conference and everyone's rapt attention before lunch. Barry titled his presentation "Moving to Health 2.0"
Barry shared that 46 is the mean age of social media users in Canada, which should give us pause for thought on who we are delivering healthcare to and how.
Health 2.0 is a digital environment that drives bedside to bench, I.e.: Tightening up how we align research and health care delivery, via a dynamic value chain that pulls together infrastructure, distribution, and applications and information exchange.
Barry feels that investments will need to be focussed in always on devices, device integration, patient/provider information gateway, digital patient ecosystem, business intelligence, information exchange, enterprise wide integrated systems, always on infrastructure, and patient driven consent. The concept is health care available any place, any time, providing anything the patient needs.
A dynamic learning health system that is always on is Barry's vision that we have elements of in place today, but we need to start to architect.
The first question went to Barry, and was how do we get to a turbocharged environment where we manage health information efficiently. Barry replied that we have to focus on the stuff that isn't sexy, the plumbing behind the system. A transparent and governed method of information exchange that includes patient focussed consent models. Barry foresees the next 18 months as a focus on identity management for the vast amount of information growing daily. Neil added that our innovation for information capture and structure needs to happen so that the information can be used intelligently.
Barry cited the video of the recent Vancouver riot and asked us the question of whether the next demographic really cares about privacy as much as the current governing generation.
When asked how risk around information management is handled, Neil noted that more education needs to be provided to clinicians on how they can contribute to the process. They can help better identify where the risks lie as we provide more access to patients of their own health information, and ask those patients to increase their ownership. Barry added that case law tends to lag the trends, but that we are not being creative enough about how we deal with risk and how we engage learnings from partner organizations such as ICBC and WorkSafe BC. This will require a culture shift that won't happen overnight but is dependent on today and tomorrow's clinicians to help establish leadership.
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Location:Kelowna, BC