Join MEDITECH in recognizing Canadian Patient Safety Week

This year’s Canadian Patient Safety Week (October 25 - 29) focuses on the important role essential care partners play in helping to keep patients safe and feeling supported, even in the age of COVID-19. With the theme, Who knows? Essential Care Partners do., Healthcare Excellence Canada is offering resources to safely re-integrate essential care partners into patient care.

It’s widely known how important it is to have a support person such as a family member or close friend present while a patient is in the hospital. Most often, they know the patient’s health history, lifestyle, and personal choices, and they can help improve health outcomes as they are typically a participant in the patient’s care.

Early on in the pandemic, however, hospitals were forced to implement strict visitation policies in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. Now that we’ve learned so much more about the virus, hospitals are better able to implement safe measures to bring essential care partners back into the fold. During Canadian Patient Safety Week, Healthcare Excellence Canada is highlighting the important role of essential care partners because of the valuable insights they provide, including potential safety issues such as fall risk, managing medications, as well as other health factors.

MEDITECH supports the efforts of our many customers who are using innovative approaches and technology to better serve patients, while keeping their communities healthy and safe. Here are a few ways we collaborate with them to help drive change in healthcare:

• MEDITECH Expanse Patient Engagement solutions - A patient’s care team extends beyond the physical walls of a healthcare organization. When an essential caregiver  isn’t able to be by the patient's side within a care setting, a key component to assist with patient care and patient outcomes is the ability to have full access to the patient’s entire care journey via the patient portal. MEDITECH’s Patient and Consumer Health Portal is multilingual with the addition of a Francophone version of the patient portal this past spring. To learn about other ways to improve the healthcare experience, please register for the November 2, 2021 Expanse Patient Connect Webinar.       

• MEDITECH EHR Excellence Toolkits - Built and maintained in collaboration with staff physicians, clinicians, and customers, our Antimicrobial Stewardship, Fall Risk Management, and, new this year, Heart Failure Management* toolkits are developed with both US and Canadian evidence sources. According to the World Heart Federation, heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization: 50 percent of all heart failure patients are readmitted within six months of discharge. 
  
  Customers, for toolkit guidance and educational videos, please visit our EHR Excellence Toolkit page. A customer login and password are required.

• Canadian Physician Advisory Committee (CPAC) - We engage with our Canadian physicians for the purposes of advancing Expanse development and assisting with physician peer networking. MEDITECH wants to ensure our development efforts reflect the pan-Canadian mission and standard of care for every jurisdiction. Additionally, we want to help you leverage your Expanse solution in the most effective way possible, to make your workflow more efficient.

• Canadian Healthcare Advocate Team (CHAT) - Lead by seasoned Client Support staff with a wide range of extensive product knowledge, CHAT’s mission is to encourage more communication and collaboration with our Canadian customers. Through its work with MEDITECH’s regulatory, strategy, and development teams, CHAT assists in prioritizing Canadian strategic projects on our Development roadmap, with an emphasis on patient safety and enhanced customer satisfaction. 

• Canadian Quality Leadership Committee (CQL) - Working with our Canadian hospital leaders, CQL helps to identify priority quality topics within Canada. Our goal is to enhance communication, inform MEDITECH’s quality development, and drive the highest level of quality care across the country.

• MEDITECH's EHR Patient Safety Review Board (PRSB) - The Board provides guidelines, education, and action plans to reduce patient safety events and improve customer satisfaction. Customers can visit our EHR Safety Corner for more information.

• Customer EHR Patient Safety Advisory Board (CEPSAB) - Sponsored by the EHR PSRB, members of the Customer EHR Patient Safety Advisory Board (CEPSAB) include nurses, pharmacists, physicians, and quality experts from healthcare organizations in Canada and the US. They are dedicated to creating the safest use of our EHR across all applications and from all healthcare stakeholder perspectives. 

To learn more about the above initiatives, please contact MEDITECH Director Patricia Pacewicz. 

For a leadership perspective on these issues, listen to our podcast with Jennifer Zelmer, PhD, President and CEO of Healthcare Excellence Canada. She discusses this new organization, as well as her passion for patient safety and equity, and what the new normal looks like for healthcare and IT.

Share your patient safety experiences with us, all week long on Twitter, #CPSW2021