Vecna Technologies has announced a partnership with Cycom Canada Corp. to bring its QC PathFinder software solution to the Canadian healthcare market.
The partnership announcement came during Cycom’s 8th annual healthcare technology fair in downtown Toronto.
Cycom is a Scarborough, Ont.-based systems integrator and service provider for IT services and is also an NCR Corp. authorized premier-level channel partner. Having already worked with Canadian hospitals to deliver and implement NCR’s Wayfinding kiosks , the new partnership with Vecna means additional sales and revenue opportunities.
Vecna’s QC PathFinder solution in currently being used in the U.S. by government and commercial hospitals. Through the new partnership with Cycom, the hope is to introduce the solution to hospitals in Canada.
QC PathFinder is a software-based solution that monitors and detects infections in real-time, in addition to also being able to perform data analysis and automatically generate custom reports. The goal of the solution is to make it easier for hospital workers to detect, prevent and report infections.
Ron Urwongse, a product manager at Cambridge, Mass.-based Vecna, said QC PathFinder monitors data feeds to help save time and paperwork when detecting potential infections and outbreaks. Designed for infection control preventionists (ICPs) in hospital environments, QC PathFinder will also conduct analysis on alerts based on whatever parameters are selected by the user. Once these are set, the solution will provide real-time information so ICPs can react quickly to infection situations.
“Infection prevention software is important because there are opportunity costs for those organizations that don’t have anything implemented,” Urwongse said. “Monitoring and detecting infections is a labour intensive process with paper-based surveillance and reporting requirements that often take valuable time away from essential prevention and management. Our solutions help save lives, time and healthcare dollars.”
Urwongse said some of today’s ICPs rely on manual chart reviews, paper-based reporting, limited staff resources and limited IT support to do their jobs. With QC PathFinder, the goal is to make it easier to find the information ICPs need and to automate the process.
The solution can be delivered using a software-as-a-service deployment model, or it can be sold as a traditional software license to the user, Urwongse said.
Cycom’s president and CEO, Al Leela, explained the benefits of the new partnership.
“We’re proud to partner with Vecna to support improved overall health in our community,” he said.
The QC PathFinder solution from Vecna will also compliment NCR’s lineup of healthcare solutions, which Cycom also sells to healthcare professionals in the Canadian market.
Stephen MacNeil, NCR’s director for healthcare, was also in attendance at the event. MacNeil explained the NCR Patient Portal and Wayfinder kiosk solution offerings, adding it has already seen “quick” adoption in the U.S. healthcare market, with similar adoption rate expectations for Canada.
“We’re seeing more need from patients now to be able to interact with their healthcare facility or hospital out of the comfort of their own workplace or home,” MacNeil said. “NCR Patient Portal allows customers to pay their bills for hospital equipment such as crutches, request schedules, request refills on prescriptions and more. The portal saves the patient time and provides them with a positive customer experience.”
The Wayfinding kiosk, which has already been deployed as part of a pilot project by Cycom into one Toronto hospital, is a solution that helps users navigate their way around the hospital. The rules-based tool can provide a visual map and print-out of a user’s desired destination, showing him or her how to get to a desired point of interest. In addition to its mapping capabilities, the kiosk can also deliver media and other important content such as health and wellness messages, MacNeil said. This content can be as targeted as the hospital or healthcare organization wants it to be since it’s delivered and monitored right on-premise.
According to Cycom, Vecna’s QC PathFinder solution is unique in the sense that it “enables staff in specific departments to create and run individual charts to determine trends in given areas and isolates both causes for concern and needs for implementing alternative safety precautions, enabling the staff to execute immediate action to prevent the spread of infection.”
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