CEO Blog: Navigating Health Care for Northerners

July – Staying accountable and improving the patient experience

On June 18, we held our Annual General Meeting to share how the 2024-2025 year went. These annual events are important touchstones where, as a health care organization, we hold ourselves accountable to you. Looking back, this past year was marked by progress, and partnerships.

I’m proud of all the ways our teams pulled together to accomplish so much, guided by our strategic priorities of improving the patient experience; improving the well-being of our providers; strengthening population health; sustaining financial stability; and advancing health equity and social accountability.

Some of the highlights include:

• Launching our Hospital-to-Home program, ensuring eligible patients have access to the services and supports they needed to recover safely in the comfort of their own homes.
• Becoming a provincial leader by integrating mental health services into our SeamlessMD platform, a digital personal health care plan designed to enhance patient experiences.
• Implementing our People Strategy, including a 12-month Health and Wellness Plan, and hiring 192 new staff.
• Reducing our reliance on agency nurses, from 77 at the start of the year to just 13 by year-end, as part of our commitment to a stable, high-quality workforce.
• Expanding regional partnerships to bring more specialized care, such as ophthalmology, pediatric services, and rheumatology, closer to home across the Cochrane District.
• Enhancing our Meditech electronic health records system, which enables more dynamic financial monitoring tools, improved clinical documentation and patient safety, while supporting people with access to one health record regardless of where they may present amongst 23 hospitals across the north.
• Advancing our Emergency Department Capital Redevelopment Project and Master Plan through user-group consultations and planning to invest in infrastructure renewal for the future.
• Achieving Accreditation with Commendation from Accreditation Canada, which affirmed our commitment to high standards of care and organizational excellence.
• Completing our first Health Equity Plan, with 31 calls to action, of which 29 were completed or tracking for completion by March 31, 2025.

ONE: One Person, One Record, One System

A huge milestone on that list was the Meditech Expanse One Health Information System implementation — one of our largest change management undertakings that involved the whole TADH team. The ONE (one person, one record, one system) Initiative is a region-wide project to improve the delivery of health care through the creation of a single electronic health information system across the 23 Hospitals in Northeastern Ontario. The primary goal of this initiative is to enhance safe, evidence-based care.

Not only is this important for our community but also for the rest of the north. I have the honour of chairing the Board of ONE HITs, a northern based shared service organization. This past year, ONE HITs successfully launched Meditech Expanse across our Northeast Hospital Network, including Timmins, and released its first strategic plan.

Patients in Northeastern Ontario can now present to any of the 23 partner hospitals and have their one chart (patient record) available. This is something we’ve been dreaming about for years: a more seamless patient journey and experience. No more relying on paper for transfers, and a more complete chart is now available with physician notes, diagnostic imaging and much more.

This digital health upgrade is making health care delivery more efficient, reducing the need for repeat testing and going over patients’ medical histories, and helping prevent medical errors by providing clinicians with the information they need to make informed care decisions.

Beside enabling the one-chart concept, the new Meditech Expanse has also streamlined our processes at TADH, saved team members time, and created new safety checks along the way. For instance, the bedside medication verification offers a series of checks by scanning patient wristbands and medications to ensure patients are getting the right medicine at the right time – reducing the possibility of errors.

Our annual report

TADH has and will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our community. At the heart of our work is a clear vision: to provide exemplary care for all Northerners. You can read our full 2024-2025 Annual Report that outlines all of our accomplishments of the past year on our website.

Hope you get to enjoy some of the warmth of summer.

Take care,

Kate Fyfe,

President and CEO