By Catherine Morin
Canadian patients often have to wait in pain for hours before being seen. The issue is widespread, and has negative impacts on healthcare costs, patient safety concerns, and of course, leads to general frustration across the board.
A recent report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, found that among other medical procedures, roughly 30 per cent of patients across Canada in 2018 requiring hip or knee replacement, or cataract surgery, did not have their procedures done within recommended wait times. Meanwhile, a recent Fraser study highlighted the financial hardship that comes with excessive wait times. The private costs incurred by the more than one million Canadians waiting for medically necessary treatment last year at $2.1 billion, or an average of $1,924 per patient, due to lost wages and reduced work productivity.
Mobia Technology Innovations, a systems integrator and technology consulting firm and this year’s diamond award winner for the Top Government Solution, is addressing these problems by simplifying how healthcare centres process referrals and deliver real-time ER information to health care professionals. Understanding the inner-workings of a hospital’s existing procedures and IT infrastructure is critical for this type of innovation, according to Todd MacCallum, Mobia’s global healthcare practice lead.
“I think one of our key strengths is that we understand how to leverage existing systems while balancing that to latest technologies,” said MacCallum.
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Together with the Eastern Health, the largest health authority in Newfoundland & Labrador, Mobia created myCCath, a software-based referral system enabling access to care in a cardiac catheterization lab.
The system ensures patients from across the province being referred to the central cath lab in St. John’s are visible at all times to referring physicians, cardiologists, nurses, and other cardiac cath laboratory personnel.
It provides electronic referrals for cardiac procedures, automatic feedback to the referring physician regarding referral status and procedure schedule, and improved administrative reporting capabilities.
Mobia has also created SurgeCon, a solution designed to improve emergency departments performance.
SurgeCon is a new digital approach to addressing emergency department inefficiency. Built on Mobia’s myOpenhealth platform, which is built on the RedHat technology stack OpenShift, SurgeCon is the only emergency department solution that automatically informs health professionals directly with specific instructions based on changes in the ER as they happen in real-time.
This year’s gold winner the Top Government Solution award went to the Toronto Police Services.
