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Summer jobs don't get much better than this.
A team of six students from different faculties at the University of Toronto has spent the past nine weeks developing Pulse Check, an online emergency room simulator – a glorified video game – that allows doctors, medical students and hospital managers to test changes in procedures, technology and staffing without putting patients' lives at risk.
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Bigger, older population emergency for hospitals
(Toronto Star Jan 8, 2008)
Dr. Dante Morra
Dr. Howard Abrams
There was a time when administrators addressed the issue by building more emergency departments. The government, hospital administrators and researchers have now articulated the problem. The recent Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) report has shown clearly that overcrowding cannot be solved in the emergency department.
The real problem is that there are too many admitted patients in emergency department beds because no acute care in-patient beds are available in the rest of the hospital. This looks like an emergency department problem, but it is not.
Second, there are too many in-patients who no longer need to be in hospital but have no rehabilitation, retirement home or nursing home bed available, or there is insufficient support for them to return home. They remain in acute care in-patient beds long past their need for acute care. So not only are there not enough acute care in-patient beds, the wrong people are in some of them and we haven't yet achieved the right balance for support in the home or support in alternative levels of care.
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2007 Recipients, 3M Health Care Quality Team Awards
UHN undertook a major transformation initiative to significantly improve patient flow from the Emergency Department (ED) to General Internal Medicine (GIM) to its post-acute care partners, to ultimately reduce wait times and improve access to UHN’s Emergency Departments. A team within UHN comprised of multiple clinical leaders and project management experts was formed to design, develop, implement and evaluate an array of improvement initiatives that fall under six themes: care coordination, care model, workflow, communication of information, work environment, and team renewal. Each of the six themes was led by a clinical leader and supported by project management experts comprised of industrial engineers, academics, and data analysts.
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Celebrating Innovations in Health Care Expo 2007 Awards - Finalist
Continuity of care or the transfer patient care from one provider to the next, referred to as patient sign-out, occurs on a daily basis. Transferring pertinent clinical information such as past histories, medications and other issues of concern is essential to this process but without mechanisms in place to ensure this transfer occurs efficiently, care becomes fragmented and patient safety is compromised. In response to this issue, a web-based electronic sign-out application was designed and developed. The application is simple to use and can be accessed by multiple users from any PC with internet access, essential considering sign-out for most clinical teams occurs at the same time. The electronic sign-out application is now being used by virtually all services across the academic teaching hospitals across the GTA.
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Sherman Quan - 2006 COACH Emerging Leader in Health Informatics Award
A distinguished panel of healthcare leaders from across Canada adjudicated the award. The panel evaluated the applications based on evidence of leadership and achievement of breakthrough results; active participation in promoting and developing the field of health informatics; and recognition by managers and peers. The panel noted the exceptionally high calibre of all applicants, and was encouraged by the tremendous show of support documented in the many letters of reference. After careful deliberation, the panel determined that Sherman Quan’s contributions to health informatics were deserving of the 2006 award.
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