Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Enhances Patient Safety And Staff Efficiency

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is among Canada's premier academic health sciences centers, with approximately 10,000 staff, physicians, volunteers and students working to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients across the greater Toronto area, throughout Ontario, and around the globe.

A key mission at Sunnybrook is continual improvement in patient care and safety, achieved through support for an effective, collaborative working environment for medical and administrative staff. IT has always played a key role in serving this mission. The ongoing developments in technology made Oliver Tsai, Director of Information Technology at Sunnybrook, realized that IT can continue to serve the hospital's mission in new ways. "We recognized that to improve the delivery of care, we needed to put access to clinical information systems into the hands of our users, regardless of where they may be. In a traditional model, access to clinical information systems meant walking to the PCs located at centralized nursing stations. Understanding the potential of Wi-Fi, we decided to take advantage of the ‘anytime, anywhere' approach and provide information directly at the point of care," explained Tsai.

In recent years, with the ubiquity of wireless in their day-to-day lives, the vast majority of hospital staff had come to expect Wi-Fi connectivity at any of the Sunnybrook campuses, according to Tsai. "We felt compelled to provide wireless as a basic network service. From a business perspective, providing access to clinical information systems was essential, but we also identified other vital services for our organization, including wireless voice over IP, location-based services and bar coding," added Tsai.