Innovation Partnership to Revolutionize Support Service Fulfillment

By: Richard Tam
Sep 7, 2016 12:10 PM ET
Richard Tam, Executive Vice-President and Chief Administrative Officer, Mackenzie Health & Chief Financial Officer, Mackenzie Innovation Institute

Innovation partnership to revolutionize support service fulfillment

This blog originally appeared on sodexoinsights.com

I am pleased to report that Mackenzie Innovation Institute (Mi2) has just entered into a new innovation partnership with Sodexo, our current supplier of comprehensive non-clinical support services.

This latest expansion of our innovation strategy aims to improve the functionality of the IT systems that manage the fulfillment of support services at Mackenzie Health. The partnership will foster innovations to be developed, evaluated and adopted to improve patient care across the healthcare system.

By achieving a higher degree of interconnectivity and flexibility, we envision making service delivery significantly more efficient and responsive to patient needs. A key benefit will be reducing the time spent by front-line clinicians on service requests, so they have more time to spend at the bedside caring for patients.

Our collective intent is to create a non-clinical support service infrastructure that is context aware, highly personalized to patient needs and adaptive to change. This exciting new iteration of Mackenzie Health’s innovation strategy is part of our overarching goal of achieving technological solutions that go beyond digital to create a truly “smart” hospital.

Key aspects of this exciting new partnership are to improve how the various IT systems that manage support service delivery communicate with each other and interface with our electronic medical record system to enable smart patient scheduling.

The goal is to get as close as possible to “one-touch point” service fulfillment. In the future, a single entry by a physician or nurse using the hospital’s patient flow software will trigger multiple service directives that are time stamped, scheduled and seamlessly delivered on time without any further involvement by the clinician.

Mackenzie Health is dedicated to using “disruptive” technologies to continuously advance the quality of patient care and this project is an important step along that path.

The pursuit of patient care excellence is never ending and the way forward requires innovative partnerships with companies, like Sodexo, who have both the know-how and the passion required to create a truly exceptional healthcare experience.

The new non-clinical service fulfillment infrastructure that we are on the threshold of achieving will ensure our team will have the finest possible support service resources both here at Mackenzie Health Richmond Hill Hospital and in the new Mackenzie Vaughan Hospital.

We also fully expect that the work we are doing to advance support service fulfillment in collaboration with Sodexo will establish new healthcare industry standards for the delivery of non-clinical support services. These foundational changes will be shared with other hospitals in Ontario and beyond, so that other healthcare communities can benefit from the knowledge we acquire.