OTTAWA – Six Ontario hospitals based in the Greater Ottawa area are excited to begin implementing Meditech’s web-based Enterprise Health Record (EHR) across all organizations, using a shared database.

The healthcare organizations, Arnprior Regional Health, Bruyère Continuing Care, Carleton Place & District Memorial Hospital, Hôpital Glengarry Memorial Hospital, Hôpital Montfort, and Queensway Carleton Hospital, make up CHAMP, the “Champlain Association of Meditech Partners.”

CHAMP is a cluster of hospitals within the Champlain Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), and is actively helping to advance the Ministry of Health’s Hospital Information System (HIS) Renewal agenda by consolidating on a single EHR.

The excitement surrounding Meditech’s innovative Web EHR is evident amongst the CHAMP leadership. “It’s a groundbreaker,” says Michael Cohen (pictured), VP of clinical support & CIO at Queensway Carleton Hospital. “It’s exciting to see Meditech continue to evolve into the future.”

The CHAMP Network, founded in 2011, provides a wide range of healthcare services and resources to support close to 1 million patients each year. Their desire is to further advance care delivery through Meditech’s new generation Web EHR.

“This project is a significant undertaking for all of our organizations to transform our clinical work and to align with Meditech to deliver all of the advanced clinicals to our patients,” Dr. Doug Cochen, CMIO at Queensway Carleton Hospital said. “The goal is to essentially become paperless in the work that we do, and to transform the way we deliver care to provide safer, more timely care, and to meet the needs of our patients and our clinicians.”

Philippe Marleau, VP of quality & CIO at Hôpital Montfort, emphasized the importance of building confidence through working closely together.

“We’re able to share our experiences and strengths by working together towards the common vision and goal of leveraging technology to improve the patient, clinician, and staff experience,” Marleau said. “It’s important that we prepare the next generation with the latest and greatest tools available to them so they can come into their new profession with confidence. It makes their profession more enjoyable and a lot safer, both for patients and for themselves.”

The CHAMP partnership was first created by Queensway Carleton Hospital, working in an existing collaboration with Arnprior Regional Health and Carleton Place & District Memorial Hospital, as well as Bruyère Continuing Care.

These organizations were all planning to upgrade to Meditech’s 6.x EHR. In an independent study initiated by the organizations, it was found that sharing a common Meditech system, running on a single database, would save on the cost of hardware, software, as well as training and ongoing support costs.

As the partnership deepened, the clinical advantages to working together became the true binding force. As Dr. Bernard Leduc, CEO at Hôpital Montfort put it, “I think it’s the force of strength in numbers, and making sure that we can standardize, instead of each of us doing our own individual things.”