Innovation Profile: Mohawk College
Mohawk College Accelerates Move to Electronic Health Records
2009 was a turning point for health informatics innovation at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario. 
That's the year, the college entered into a partnership with Canada Health Infoway to build prototype software components for a pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution. The same year, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's Community and College Innovation Program granted $2.3 million to the Mohawk College Applied Research Centre to advance technology transfer and train highly qualified people for the growing health informatics sector.
"Through health informatics R&D, our students are learning software engineering by applying it to actual complex projects," says Professor Duane Bender, Principal Investigator. "We also have 100% employment in related jobs for graduates of our Specialization in Health Informatics program."
The partnership between Canada Health Infoway and Mohawk began with the Electronic Health Record Solutions Blueprint project. This is the IT plan to connect provincial health systems and accelerate the adoption of integrated electronic health records across multiple platforms. The objectives are to improve quality of care, enhance health care efficiency and productivity, expand patient access to the health system, and promote patient safety.
Mohawk's prototype is an open-source software development project, with intellectual property shared among technology experts and code writers. Partners include 3M, Intel, and the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
"Infoway's collaboration with Mohawk provides a comprehensive 'sandbox' for public and private sector organizations to assess how they can interface with the Blueprint architecture to deliver value," says Ron Parker, Canada Health Infoway's Group Director of Electronic Health Record Solutions Architecture. "R&D projects can dramatically reduce the costs, timelines and risks associated with evaluation and testing."
Toronto Region is home to leading health informatics and ICT businesses and significant public sector health informatics customers, provincially and federally. In Ontario, there are more than 150 hospital corporations and 13 million patient records. Additionally, the Government of Canada is currently investing more than $2 billion to implement the Electronic Health Record Solutions project.
© 2010 Toronto Region Research Alliance