Trillium Health, Mackenzie Health earn awards

TORONTO – Trillium Health Partners and Mackenzie Health were award winners in the healthcare category at the annual Digital Transformation Awards, held by IT World Canada as part of its Digital Transformation Week. Trillium won in the Small Public Sector category for synthesizing thousands of pieces of COVID-19 data to create the website How’s My Flattening.

More than 150 people have volunteered to develop and maintain the site. It distills data from various sources into an at-a-glance dashboard that helps healthcare professionals allocate resources to keep patients safe.

“We were hearing stories from our colleagues in Italy and other places in the world who, a month or two (earlier), were totally fine, and then their ICUs were overloaded. And people like myself were very scared about what that meant for Ontario,” recalled Dr. Ben Fine (pictured), clinical scientist at Trillium Health Partners.

With help from Red Hat’s OpenShift solution, COVID-19 data was collected and analyzed to build visuals for the howsmyflattening.ca website. The analytics turned daily pandemic case numbers into a cohesive data alert system to keep Ontario’s healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

“What we wanted to do is say, hey, how do we make it clear to people what is going on here?” Dr. Fine said. “And how do we show people that this exponential growth in the number of cases, if we continue to do nothing, is going to overload our already overloaded healthcare system?”

For its part, Mackenzie Health took home the 2021 award in the Large Public Sector division. Mackenzie partnered with Compugen to build digital infrastructure for Canada’s first “smart” hospital. The Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital in Vaughan, Ont. features more than 6,500 sensors to securely track patient movement, 700 connected iPhones to enable real time patient notifications, and thousands of edge devices to capture patient data.

The Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital opened first in February 2021 as a facility dedicated to COVID-19 patients and took in more than 500 patients from across the Greater Toronto Area to relieve COVID-19 related crowding at other healthcare institutions.

In June, it opened its doors as a full-service hospital, with an ER, operating rooms, birthing centre and a range of other medical services.