Electronic Health Records

Eight Montréal hospital sites choose Oacis for EHR

The Montréal-based McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) have signed an agreement to implement DINMAR’s Oacis EHR as their electronic health record system.

The English-speaking McGill University Health Centre consists of five large teaching hospitals, while the Francophone CHUM is made up of three major hospitals.

While there is close cooperation between the two organizations, which share a CIO, each of the two establishments will have its own applications and database systems completely independent of the other organization. When fully implemented enterprise-wide, the Oacis system will help manage more than 2,800 beds, 80,000 inpatient stays, and over 1.6 million outpatient visits annually.

“With involvement from numerous stakeholders across both organizations, a public RFP and a thorough search was conducted among the major EHR suppliers and Oacis was the clear choice of both organizations for a variety of reasons,” said Jean Huot (pictured at left), CIO of the CHUM and the MUHC.

“The level of functionality achieved by the product, its user-friendliness and its bilingual capabilities were big winners with our selection committees. Our technology teams were attracted to its ability to quickly connect separate systems across all sites, thus preserving our current I.T. investments,” Huot said. “From an executive viewpoint, Oacis fully supports our strategy to consolidate clinical information systems across diverse healthcare delivery landscapes, and to contribute to improving care quality.”

In an interview with Canadian Healthcare Technology at HIMSS/Dallas in February, Mark Groper, president and CEO of Dinmar, pointed out that the interoperability capabilities built right into Oacis were among the most important features for the Montreal hospitals. Groper noted that OACIS is, in fact, an acronym for Open Architecture Clinical Information System.

The system was designed with a clinical data repository and built-in integration engine at its core, thereby easing interoperability among separate systems.

Moreover, an enterprise master patient index application identifies patients across all organizations and automatically eliminates duplicate records as they flow through the network. According to Oacis, an underlying database management system from Sybase meshes with the technologies and clinical applications to ensure that caregivers have access to a complete and accurate patient record throughout broad and complex organizations.

“The selection of Oacis at the CHUM and the MUHC continues to re-enforce the strong market need for open systems, which empower healthcare sites with robust, yet easy-to-use EHR functionality,” said Groper. “Although the competition is always very challenging, we knew early on that the Oacis solution was perfectly suited for the complex needs of the MUHC and the CHUM. We look forward to helping these world-renowned healthcare organizations meet their clinical and operational goals.”

Thanks to its innovative and intuitive user interface, Oacis Order Management has won accolades from physicians, who say it is the most comprehensive solution for computerized physician order entry (CPOE) available today, according to a Dinmar release.

Also, the built-in drug prescription capabilities instantly respond with appropriate alerts to patient-specific information located within the record.

Integrated with the CPOE is Oacis’ flexible clinical documentation module that allows clinicians to record a broad spectrum of plans, actions, observations, and results. Moreover, while alternative systems struggle with performance issues, Oacis can significantly scale up in size and still provide clinicians with rapid response time.

For its part, the CHUM is a university hospital centre that provides specialized and super-specialized services to a regional and supraregional clientele.

Within its more immediate coverage area, it also offers general and specialized hospital care and services. All of these services contribute to teaching, research and the assessment of technologies, as well as healthcare methodologies.

These services are provided within integrated networks. The CHUM also contributes to continually promoting front-line health services. The CHUM’s research centre employs more than 300 researchers who work in various fields to improve the public’s well-being. Hôtel-Dieu, Hôpital Notre-Dame and Hôpital Saint-Luc merged in 1996 to form the CHUM, which now counts 10,000 employees, 1,000 physicians and 800 volunteers who render services to more than 500,000 patients each year.

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) is a comprehensive academic health institution with an international reputation for excellence in clinical programs, research and teaching.

The MUHC is a merger of five teaching hospitals affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University – the Montreal Children’s, Montreal General, Royal Victoria, and Montreal Neurological hospitals, as well as the Montreal Chest Institute.

Building onthe tradition of medical leadership of the founding hospitals, the goal of the MUHC is to provide patient care based on the most advanced knowledge in the healthcare field, and to contribute to the development of new knowledge.

The collaborative efforts of the MUHC and the CHUM serve an increasingly diverse multicultural community, communicating with patients in over 40 languages. One-third of the patients seeking its ultra-specialized care come from regions of Quebec outside of Montréal, from other parts of Canada, and from the United States.

Ottawa-based Dinmar is a leading North American healthcare information technology solutions provider. According to the company, its Oacis EHR product was instrumental in launching the “open systems” revolution and has spawned many innovative technologies and clinical-interoperability standards in commercial use today.

For more information, visit www.dinmar.com.