Hypercare plays increasing role in connecting community providers

It wasn’t too long ago that healthcare service providers on community teams in Ontario’s Wellington County performed their duties without a secure means of communication to share patient information.

Team members worked for multiple agencies and organizations that used different systems for documentation and communication. Hospital staff used Meditech, staff associated with family health teams used an EMR, Ontario Health atHome used the Client Health and Related Information System (CHRIS) and workers associated with various human and social service agencies used Caseworks.

Lacking a common, secure communication system, team members had to rely on non-PHIPA-compliant texting platforms, phone, fax and email to update each other about the care they were providing and their patients’ condition.

That changed in July 2024 when the Ontario Centre for Innovation’s Innovating Digital Health Solutions program funded six Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) to acquire Hypercare, a PHIPA-compliant clinical communication, coordination and scheduling system that outreach workers could access on their smartphones or desktops.

Today, the Guelph-Wellington Ontario Health Team is one of 14 OHTs in the province using Hypercare. Use cases vary, but the Guelph-Wellington OHT stands out as the organization with the most users – 800 and counting, according to Venus Lee, Hypercare’s head of customer success.

All 800 healthcare workers in the Guelph-Wellington OHT are searchable and can be messaged through Hypercare, “so if I need to reach somebody at Guelph General Hospital, I can just start typing their name,” said Elsa Mann, manager of team and program development with the Mount Forest Family Health Team.

Hypercare is widely used in hospitals both as an alternative to pagers and as an on-call schedule that both hospital staff and outreach providers in the community can access for an emergency consult with a specialist.

Mann, who participates in these integrated teams, credits Hypercare for keeping occupational therapists, physiotherapists, wound care specialists, mental health workers and paramedics up-to-date on their patients’ condition and needs.

They primarily use the application for updates and short messages to team members – not for extensive documentation, but an observation or detail of importance in a message can always be added by a team member to their EMR or other medical record system.

“We work closely with our outreach teams and community partners to pull services together from different healthcare disciplines, so Hypercare has become our go-to tool for communicating who is going out, what challenges we’re experiencing and how to mitigate them in real-time,” said Mann.

“One of the things we used to hear from the complex patients we serve was, ‘Don’t you people talk to each other? I’ve already told you this. Why do I have to tell you again?’” That’s less of a problem now.

In addition to sending an individual message to someone, Hypercare allows users to create patient-centric niche groups for clients with multiple team members. That’s how conversations are kept separate. Team members can also be added and removed from these groups as team membership changes over time.

Phone, fax and email are still used from time to time but “in terms of time-sensitive communication, Hypercare has been a real benefit,” said Mann.

In the past, using non-PHIPA-compliant communication required outreach workers to use the patient’s initials or ID number to avoid a privacy infraction.

In contrast, “Using Hypercare, we can now identify the patient by name,” said Mann, “so everyone knows who we’re talking about. It’s secure and allows us to co-ordinate care in a way that is more seamless for the patient.”

The Guelph-Wellington OHT is also one of seven OHTs in the province selected to deliver community care using the Integrated Patient Care Team (IPCT) model, which also relies on Hypercare for team communication.

Instead of multiple care coordinators managing the care of rostered patients and outreach teams with providers from multiple service provider organizations, the IPCT model has one Ontario Health atHome care co-ordinator managing a team of in-home care providers from a single organization.

Instead of each provider in the traditional model having a distinct care plan, in the IPCT model there is one shared care plan accessible to the entire team.

The Guelph-Wellington OHT has seven IPCT teams affiliated with rural and urban family health teams.

The Mount Forest FHT and Minto-Mapleton FHTs IPCT teams have approximately 300 complex care patients rostered.

New use cases for Hypercare keep materializing and increasing the number of users in Guelph-Wellington. One new addition, for example, is a police and mental health team that makes calls in tandem to ensure the presence of someone with mental health training.

Patient concerns can also be relayed through Hypercare. For example, if a patient has an appointment in Mount Forest or Guelph and doesn’t have transportation – a common problem in rural Wellington County – an outreach team member can share that information with the team, using Hypercare, to find a solution.

Hypercare has several features and capabilities that enhance communication effectiveness. For example, there is an urgent alert feature that allows users to prioritize emergency messages by overriding smartphone silent and do not disturb settings. Message delivery and read receipt are available to let outreach staff know if a message has been successfully sent and seen by the recipient.

Community workers can use Hypercare to take a photograph of a patient’s wound and share it with a wound care specialist. The imaging capability can also be used by outreach workers to document a hazard in the patient’s home that poses a risk both to the patient and outreach workers, said Mann.

Photos taken through the Hypercare app use the smartphone’s camera, but the actual images aren’t saved in the user’s personal camera roll.

According to a Guelph-Wellington OHT survey and evaluation of Hypercare for fiscal year 2025-26, 90.4 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that Hypercare enables efficient and effective sharing of patient health information.

“Most participants indicated they would recommend Hypercare to colleagues and see themselves continuing to use it, showing strong overall satisfaction and willingness to adopt the platform.”