Coming up on Tuesday, August 28 from 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM, the QBIC (Quality Based Improvements in Care) team will be hosting a webinar with guest speakers Dr. Upe Mehan & Kate Harvey on how to use QBIC's new osteoporosis tool for primary care electronic medical records (EMRs).
Our Health Links case studies featured on HQO's Quorum site
Monday, July 30, 2018
Last year, the eHealth Centre of Excellence partnered with the Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network (WWLHIN) to conduct an evaluation on the benefits of the Health Links Approach to Care within its sub-regions through a series of case studies.
Quorum is a free open online community dedicated to improving the quality of health care in Ontario – together. It is a forum where members can collaborate to learn from each other, share experiences, and support innovation from idea inception through to meaningful improvement. For more information, please click here.
Kidney Talks, Achieving Excellence Together & Hacking Health Café
Thursday, June 28, 2018
It’s conference season! In addition to eHealth 2018 and WWCRQI, the eHealth Centre of Excellence has participated in a number of other events that recently.
Kidney Talks 2018
eHealth Centre of Excellence Managing Director Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia (pictured left) gave a presentation at Kidney Talks 2018, hosted by the Ontario Renal Network (ORN), and spoke about how the Kidney Wise toolkit is now available in a format that can be integrated with primary care electronic medical records (EMRs). For more information on this tool, take a look at the QBIC (Quality Based Improvements in Care) catalogue!
Achieving Excellence Together 2018
eHealth Centre of Excellence team members Allie Piatkowski and Lori-Anne Huebner participated in a Health Links panel that highlighted different types of Health Links evaluations in Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) across the province. Their presentation focused on the evaluation that they had completed on the Health Links approach to care in the Waterloo Wellington LHIN, to understand how it is impacting patients and care providers. To take a look at their Health Links case studies, please click here.
Hacking Health Café
As part of Communitech’s Peer2Peer Network, Hacking Health Waterloo provides a forum where technology creators and health care professionals can connect to discuss and collaborate on issues with the hopes of improving health care in Waterloo Region. To help foster this collaboration among the digital health community, Hacking Health Cafés are held monthly across various locations in the region.
Burgoyne (pictured below, left) and Sara Di Gregorio provided an overview and background of the project, as well as a live demonstration of the VirtualCare platform. The audience was heavily engaged and the presentation yielded many great questions that sparked some interesting discussion – it was a pleasure to meet and network with this diverse group of professionals and we hope to join another Hacking Health Café again in the future!
We’re always looking for more opportunities to share knowledge and spread the word on the digital health services available (or coming soon).
For more information, please feel free to explore our website or contact info@ehealthce.ca.
Calling all primary care providers in Waterloo Wellington: stay connected with the primary care newsletter!
This is the start of a communication network for all primary care providers (family physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants) within the Kitchener-Waterloo-Wilmot-Wellesley-Woolwich (KW4) area to provide important information about health services, referral processes, practice opportunities, and professional development.
Pertinent and succinct information, curated and edited by family physicians, will be disseminated via a bi-monthly newsletter.
Contributors include:
eHealth Centre of Excellence
WWLHIN
McMaster University
Health Force Ontario
KW Chamber of Commerce
Waterloo Region Public Health
To start receiving the KW4 Primary Care Newsletter, please click here to register.
Hannele Kivinen at 1:30 PM
Big milestone for our System Coordinated Access (SCA) program
Monday, June 25, 2018
Exciting news! On June 25, 2018, the System Coordinated Access (SCA) program hit a big milestone: since their electronic referral (eReferral) solution went live in Waterloo Wellington ten months ago, 5,000 eReferrals have now been processed.
A number of team members from the eHealth Centre of Excellence were thrilled to be invited to participate in the McMaster Waterloo Wellington Clinical Research and Quality Improvement Symposium, an annual event which puts the spotlight on local clinical research and quality improvement initiatives. This year’s symposium took place on May 30, and was attended by over 250 students, clinicians, professionals, and researchers from across the Waterloo Wellington region.
Alexandra Piatkowski and Billy Bostad presented a poster based on some of the research they’ve done for the connecting South West Ontario (cSWO) Program Primary Care Data Sharing (PCDS) proof of concept, which is exploring the feasibility of making data from primary care electronic medical records (EMRs) shareable with the cSWO Regional Clinical Viewer, ClinicalConnect™. You can see their full poster presentation here.
There was also a poster presentation by Jennifer La from our QBIC (Quality Based Improvements in Care) Program, which took a closer look at the benefits of giving patients tablets to fill out mental health assessments while they’re in the waiting room. Her poster can be viewed here.
Heba Tallah Mohammed from our System Coordinated Access (SCA) Program was also on hand to present her poster – available here – on the benefits of the electronic referral (eReferral) platform currently being deployed by the SCA team.
The eHealth Centre of Excellence also hosted a booth this year (pictured left), giving attendees the chance to learn more about the various digital health services and tools we offer.
And after the event, we were excited to learn that our participation was recognized with the following awards:
eHealth Centre of Excellence participates in e-Health 2018
Friday, June 8, 2018
Canada’s annual e-Health conference, now in its 18th year, offers a fantastic opportunity to learn about digital health initiatives that are taking place across the country, as well as share learnings about the local solutions that are working for us with the conference’s 1,500+ delegates (representing experts from across the spectrum of healthcare and information technologies).
This year, the eHealth Centre of Excellence was invited to give a number of presentations that showcased some of the work we’re supporting to deploy digital health technologies in our region.
Lori-Anne Huebner (pictured right) gave a poster presentation on “A Model of Practice to Support Vendor Procurement” – the poster is available here, and takes a look at the innovation procurement model used by our System Coordinated Access (SCA) Program to find a vendor capable of building an electronic referral (eReferral) solution that could meet a number of
complex needs. That eReferral solution has since gone live in Waterloo Wellington (with over 5,000 eReferrals now sent!), and is in the process of being adopted in other regions across Ontario.
Danika Walden also presented on the innovative methodologies used to procure a technology solution for Virtual Visits in Waterloo Wellington, which is currently in the midst of a year-long proof of concept.
And finally, Ted Alexander (pictured left) – our Vice-President of Partnerships & Clinical Innovations – gave a talk on the unique digital health service bundle that we offer, as our region’s one-stop resource for ehealth tools and services .
Overall, we were delighted to be able to participate and share updates on the many exciting ehealth initiatives we’re currently supporting – and we’re already looking forward to next year’s event!
