Sunnybrook’s EHR goes live with consent management

TORONTO – Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, a leading academic health sciences centre affiliated with the University of Toronto and one of Canada’s largest trauma and acute care hospitals, and HIPAAT Inc., a leading provider of consent management and auditing solutions for healthcare, have announced the successful go-live of HIPAAT’s privacy service supporting SunnyCare.

“Ensuring the privacy for our patients’ personal health information is paramount for us, and we have an opportunity to incorporate Privacy by Design principles for consent management into SunnyCare as we are building it,” said Sam Marafioti (pictured), Sunnybrook Chief Information Officer. “HIPAAT’s consent and auditing tools support our commitment to privacy assurance and are a great complement to SunnyCare and to our privacy program overall.”

Earlier this year, Sunnybrook’s SunnyCare system received national recognition by being named a LEADing Practice by Canada Health Infoway (CHI). This award recognizes organizations demonstrating outstanding leadership in the advanced use of technology in clinical practice.

SunnyCare was noted for providing timely access to information and fostering increased collaboration and communication among healthcare teams. SunnyCare is also fully integrated with many clinical information systems, including regional repositories such as Connecting GTA, Patient Results Online (PRO) and Hospital Diagnostic Imaging Repository Services (HDIRS).

“Now that SunnyCare is live with Privacy eSuite, clinicians can be alerted to any existing patient privacy restrictions,” stated Jeff Curtis, Sunnybrook’s Chief Privacy Officer. “The integration manages and tracks access to consent-restricted PHI, captures a reason for any consent overrides and generates detailed audit reports for every access to patient records in SunnyCare.”

HIPAAT consent management solution electronically manages patients’ consent to control access for the use and disclosure of their personal health information (PHI), bringing an essential privacy component to health information access. This service is most effective when combined with HIPAAT’s Universal Audit Repository, which captures related privacy and security events.

“It has been a pleasure working with Sunnybrook team members to integrate our products,” said Kel Callahan, President and COO of HIPAAT. “We look forward to further supporting Sunnybrook through our Innovation Centre relationship.”

About Sunnybrook

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is inventing the future of healthcare for the one million patients the hospital cares for each year through the dedication of its more than 10,000 staff and volunteers. An internationally recognized leader in research and education and a full affiliation with the University of Toronto distinguishes Sunnybrook as one of Canada’s premier academic health sciences centres. Sunnybrook specializes in caring for Canada’s war veterans, high-risk pregnancies, critically ill newborns, adults and the elderly, and treating and preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological and psychiatric disorders, orthopaedic and arthritic conditions and traumatic injuries.

About HIPAAT

HIPAAT provides consent management and privacy auditing solutions to healthcare. Our SOA-based software balances consumer information privacy with the clinical need to access personal health information. Our interoperable, standards-based approach enables stakeholders at all levels of health data sharing to implement, audit and enforce patient, organizational and jurisdictional privacy policies. For more information, visit www.hipaat.com.