New Health Systems Research Cluster Created with $120,000 Grant from MITACS, IBM

Researchers were awarded a $120,000 grant from MITACS-Accelerate in partnership with IBM Canada for six innovative research projects to enhance efficiency and performance in health systems. Centred at the IBM Centre for Business Analytics and Performance (CBAP), these projects leverage the expertise of the Telfer School of Management and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Using operations research methods, the projects aim for improvements in the delivery of healthcare in the following areas:

Capacity Planning for a Network of Community Care for the Elderly

Craig Kuziemsky (Telfer) with Liam Peyton (EECS) will simulate and model the flow of patients through the system of community of care. The research will provide capacity plans for the various nodes in a network that runs from acute care, through sub-acute and into home service, assisted living and long term care housing. The goal is to remove congestion in patient flow through the system and to ensure reasonable wait times.

Information System Support for Patient Care Process Performance Management

Liam Peyton, Greg Richards (Telfer) and Wojtek Michalowski (Telfer) will explore the development of care process monitoring applications within a generic application framework for patient care process performance management. These tools will provide both a user experience component to collect form data and display real-time analytics used to monitor and manage care processes and a data integration component for collecting, processing, aggregating and reporting events relevant to care process management.

Enhancing the Diagnostic Process through Application of Data-Mining Techniques

This project by Bijan Raahemi (Telfer) and Daniel Amyot (EECS) will aim to improve the depression diagnostic process by identifying bio-markers for depression as well as co-morbidity indicators through data mining of electro-encephalogram (EEG) recordings and matched sample cardiac data.

Supporting Operations of Clinicians Using Operations Research Methods

In collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Wojtek Michalowski and Daniel Amyot will contribute a framework to conduct an assessment of the performance of emergency department physicians, one that captures the effectiveness of their services and the efficiency involved in providing these services. The framework model will be calibrated and validated using emergency department data.

Diabetes Management Process Flow

This project led by Greg Richards and Daniel Amyot centres on the Community Diabetes Education Program (CDEP) of Ottawa. It will map the CDEP process within the Centretown Community Health Centre and expand the map to other community resources that feed the CDEP as well as those that support it. A simulation of the impact of process changes on patient quality and process efficiency will be developed. The project uses IBM Blueworks and IBM Websphere Business Process Manager.

Supporting Operations of Interdisciplinary Healthcare Teams with a Multi-Agents Methodology

Daniel Amyot and Wojtek Michalowski will develop a multi-agent decision support system to facilitate collaboration and coordination among interdisciplinary healthcare team members. The system will align execution of tasks according to a patient management workflow and assign team members to these tasks according to formally described capabilities.

The Telfer School of Management aims to contribute solutions to Canada’s health challenges and prepare students to be meaningful contributors in health systems management – one of the School’s three strategic areas of excellence. A principal focus is to create and validate enabling technologies, processes and practices and to generate management expertise that improves health costs and outcomes.