Articles

Long-term care facilities across Canada have been battling numerous challenges in the past year due to circumstances brought on by the COVID-19 virus. From ongoing staffing shortages, facility outbreaks, changing resident needs and acuity levels, quarantining, staff sick days, and overall stress and burnout, this sector’s staffing resource needs are frequently changing. And with an already problematic undersupply of healthcare workers, long-term care facilities and nursing homes are in desperate need of additional help in supporting the daily needs of their residents.

Healthcare facilities need nurses in order to provide patient care, but the number of nursing vacancies in Canadian hospitals continues to grow at an alarming rate. Whether a result of deferred hiring for full-time positions, lack of specialized training, or competition from healthcare facilities in other countries, our nursing shortage has compounded to critical levels in a time of global crisis when we need them most.

Clinical research plays a central role in medical advancements and improving patient treatments. Research is well-known to be a long and arduous process, with great rewards for those who publish. From identifying the right research hypothesis, securing funding, identifying and recruiting patient groups, collecting and analyzing data, and then publishing and promoting the research findings, each step takes time and may require unique methodology depending on the clinical specialty. 

Modern-day research centers and early-adopters of digital innovations are reaping the benefits of using big data for clinical research. Using big data accelerates the research pipeline by facilitating study cohort identification and collaborations between research institutions, as well as increasing publication output and improving the ROI.

Knowing whether a patient cohort already exists before starting recruitment can be done through an organized database of EHRs. Using a centralized database of de-identified EHRs, which include digital notes about health, socio-economic and genetic data, I.o.T data, etc., reduces the chance that researchers will fail to meet their recruitment targets, exceed the planned timeline, or that the study will fail to meet statistical significance. Visibility on patient numbers directly supports making informed decisions and impacts the direction of the research question.

Using a centralized database of de-identified electronic health records (EHR) can help clinical researchers determine study feasibility, expedite patient recruitment, reinforce grant applications, and avoid research dead-ends in a cost-effective manner. 

Patient health information, which normally resides in paper forms or Electronic Health Records (EHRs), is well protected under a number of regulations, including PIPEDA in Canada, HIPAA in the USA, and GDPR in Europe. These regulations exist to safeguard the privacy and security of sensitive information and to ensure that patients feel safe participating in research, without the fear that their personal information will be made public or fall into the wrong hands. This protects individuals’ dignity and benefits society at large.

From the much-maligned Phoenix federal payroll system to the new 1GX payroll system in Alberta [1], we have seen the impact that incorrect payroll can have on the satisfaction and well-being of government employees; in these times of global crisis, we need to make sure that our healthcare employees on the frontline aren’t burdened with the same kind of additional stress.

In this article, see how long-term care facilities can ensure safe levels of staffing for patient care, even in a pandemic crisis, with an efficient workforce management system in place to monitor and quickly respond to absences, staff shortages, late arrivals, and last-minute shift changes.

While Electronic Health Records (EHRs) open the door to the advantages of big data in clinical research, significant challenges related to patient consent, confidentiality, governance, traceability, and security must be addressed, especially within the healthcare context.

Using a bioinformatics platform to narrow in on patient cohorts that match precise inclusion and exclusion criteria in 5 minutes or less allows researchers to prepare grant applications grounded in data, save time on recruitment, build collaborations across institutions, and increase their research capacity.

Many countries across the globe have felt the enormous impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the Long-Term Care (LTC) sector. While the risk is most obvious in the vulnerable elderly residents, many of whom are in frail states with advanced medical conditions, the health care workers who are caring for these patients daily are also at high risk.

In the solution Logibec NOAH, we have been using Kafka as message bus to transfer data from on-premise source systems to the cloud infrastructure. While trying to assess the machine requirements, we could not find precise documentation about the minimum CPU and memory requirements for the performance of Kafka. With this in mind, we performed a benchmark of our setup on Microsoft Azure and we explored a few approaches to optimize the stack for speed. We decided to publish the results so that others can benefit from our findings.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought many pre-existing concerns in the healthcare industry back into the spotlight, and one of the more prevalent issues has been the availability and proper scheduling of healthcare staff.

Well-balanced hospital staff scheduling is critical to ensure a safe and productive working environment, especially in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic where resources are stretched thin, and patients’ needs are greater than ever.

For most companies that operate outside the healthcare sector, little time and limited resources are spent tackling issues like recurring overtime and absenteeism. These issues, however, represent a routine problem for most hospitals and primary care institutions across Canada and, if neglected, can prove costly.

Long hours, physically taxing work, and hazardous working conditions all contribute to increasing workplace stress and undermining healthcare employee performance. What are the consequences on the well-being and performance of employees hospital-wide?

Infrastructure security aims to limit the vulnerability of infrastructures and information systems to growing threats. This means adopting an appropriate mix of security measures, business continuity practises and emergency management planning measures to ensure that adequate response procedures are in place to deal with disruptions and natural disasters.

In healthcare, human resources management has many complex variables and is significantly more challenging than in other industry sectors. Formulating and monitoring employees’ working hours based on changing or evolving work patterns is definitely challenging for Canadian hospitals and care institutions.

Traditional scheduling methods are rapidly becoming ineffective at meeting modern healthcare requirements. While manual scheduling is rigid and susceptible to human errors, technology now offers unique opportunities to streamline conventional processes and makes nurse scheduling cost-efficient for Canadian care institutions.

Human resources are one of the greatest sources of expense for hospitals. When looking at the average Canadian healthcare organization’s financial statement, chances are salaries and wages easily make up more than 70 percent of that institution’s total expenses. Evidently, healthcare professionals like nurses represent such a valuable resource, that healthcare facilities are determined to allocate them in a cost-effective way.

The scheduling system that a hospital commits to has a direct impact on the administrative and operational costs that are generated downstream. Discover a few examples of how a hospital can benefit from transitioning to a digital scheduling solution.

Staff scheduling plays a central role in the management of Canadian hospitals’ day-to-day activities. To this day, it is still a very conventional, people-driven process that relies mostly on manual labour. Digital technology is now offering practical new ways to optimize conventional scheduling processes. Discover some of the challenges that hospitals and care facilities may face when selecting new technologies.

Digitization of healthcare operational processes represents a concrete and measurable approach to creating opportunities for automation and cost containment across patient and resident-based healthcare service infrastructures. However, many healthcare organizations, such as hospitals and long-term care facilities, are not equally fortunate and have yet to see technology optimize their processes.