On Thursday January 20th, 2011 North York General Hospital and IBM launched an initiative aimed at improving patient care and hospital efficiency. North York General Hospital is using new analytics software developed by IBM, which gathers patient and hospital data and presents it in real time for doctors, administrators and other hospital staff.
The analytics system collects data from fifty collection points from twelve internal systems across the hospital's three sites, the data is digitized and consolidated into a central data warehouse. Advanced analytics is applied to the data, producing a web based picture of the hospital's clinical, financial and administrative performance. The IBM Power System analyzes vast amounts of complex data in real time. By tracking key performance indicators in real-time, healthcare decision-makers can quickly notice changes in trends, and use such information to make changes in practices, programs and services that will benefit patients, the hospital and the health care system as a whole. Some examples of how the integrated system enables hospital staff to improve efficiency and adjust operations include tracking how long a patient has been waiting in an emergency room or how effectively the beds were utilized. With this new system, Doctors at North York General Hospital will have a full view of a patient's clinical treatment patterns and outcomes.
"We pride ourselves on being a learning organization, but to sustain such a culture, we needed to have a structure that enables us to understand, learn from our actions, and identify areas for performance improvement quickly and easily." - Janak Jass, vice-president of strategy and organizational performance at North York General Hospital
Before the partnership with IBM, North York General Hospital measured performance levels within the facility, due to the constraint of the manual labour intensive process it was challenging to analyze the data on a unit by unit basis. North York General Hospital is a multi-site teaching community hospital and is the first hospital in Canada to employ the comprehensive healthcare advanced analytics approach from IBM which aims to improve patient care.
Internal and external demand for data and information has increased exponentially over the past few years, with the inception of Local Health Integration Networks across Canada, a growing population and an announcement from the province of Ontario that it intends to change the way hospitals are funded, there are growing pressures on hospitals to treat patients more efficiently and perform at higher levels, while providing more cost-effective patient care.
"IBM is creating a smarter, more connected healthcare system that can deliver better care with fewer mistakes, predicts and prevents diseases, and empowers people to make better choices. This includes integrating data so doctors, patients and insurers can share information seamlessly and efficiently. IBM also helps clients apply advanced analytics to improve medical research, diagnosis and treatment in order to improve patient care and help reduce healthcare costs." - IBM.com
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