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November 16, 2012 – The Ottawa Hospital is proud to announce that Mobile Enterprise Magazine has named it the winner of the 2012 Mobilizer Award in the Enterprise-Wide Mobility Deployment category. The Mobile Enterprise “Mobilizer Awards” honor the most effective and innovative mobile technology deployments of the year.

“The hospital’s mobility strategy has transformed the way we do our work,” says Dr. Glen Geiger, Chief Medical Information Officer at The Ottawa Hospital. “Our clinicians are finding it to be more efficient to review results and orders at the bedside and our patients are more engaged.”

The Ottawa Hospital provides medical assistance to residents in Eastern Ontario, while also providing a wide variety of educational opportunities across all health-care disciplines in partnership with the University of Ottawa and other affiliated universities, community colleges and training organizations. With the goal of becoming a top 10% performer in quality and safety of patient care in North America, and a vision to provide each patient with the world-class care, exceptional service and compassion you would want for a loved one, the hospital developed an aggressive mobility plan.

The IS development team transitioned The Ottawa Hospital’s existing EMR onto the iPad and piloted the application with a team of front line clinicians. The resounding success of the pilot prompted the hospital to define and execute a business case to provide the mobile EMR to all physicians, pharmacists, liaison nurses and medical students.

The impact of this rollout has been to save physicians’ time and to improve the quality of physician communications with patients. It is now routine to share x-ray images and other results directly with the patient or his or her family, while at the bedside. This results in clearer communications, greater patient understanding and an enhanced sense of control by the patient.

The Ottawa Hospital’s electronic physician ordering project has met with huge success among physicians and medical residents, in part because of their ability to enter electronic orders, anywhere, anytime. As a result of this project, the hospital has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of fixed site PC-workstation requests and a reduction in staff training time on its clinical applications.

“Our physicians and residents, armed with mobile devices, have immediate access to crucial clinical information, reference materials and tools like Order Entry at their finger tips no matter where they are – at a patient’s bedside, in clinic or offsite. That means better care for our patients,” says Valérie Gamache-O’Leary, Chief Information Officer at The Ottawa Hospital. “Mobility is turning out to be a silver bullet for health care. With smart devices, we are able to make significant transformational workflow changes that are virtually imperceptible to our clinicians because the form factor is so easy to use.”

The Mobile Enterprise “Mobilizer Awards” honor the best deployments of mobile technology across more than a dozen vertical markets. The publication bases its award decisions on ease of deployment, innovation and business improvement. The winners were announced at the Mobile Enterprise Executive Summit which took place November 7-9, 2012, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Sarasota, FL. The 2012 Mobile Enterprise Mobilizer Awards can be found in the November/December 2012 issue of Mobile Enterprise Magazine and online at http://mobileenterprise.edgl.com/.

For more information contact:

Hazel Harding
Communications Advisor
The Ottawa Hospital
E: hharding@toh.on.ca
T: 613-737-8460