Celebrating Our Canadian Customers This Canada Day

With Canada Day on the horizon, we are taking a moment to reflect on important partnerships we’ve forged over the years with leading Canadian healthcare providers. Since the onset of COVID-19, the healthcare landscape has been confronted with a wide array of challenges - specifically around minimizing in-person visits and tackling the mounting surgical backlog due to the suspension of elective surgeries at multiple points during the pandemic. These healthcare providers have risen to the challenge and have been on mission to provide the highest quality patient care by delivering digital care journeys through platforms such as SeamlessMD. With digital care journeys for chronic care, surgery, maternity care, mental health and additions, they were able to connect, engage and monitor patients before, during and after hospitalization extending care beyond the four walls of the hospital.

The pandemic as well as other factors such as staffing shortages and the need to reach patient populations in rural areas motivated Canadian hospitals to address the gaps in care, and determine where technology can help redefine the healthcare system. Job vacancies in healthcare increased by more than 90% in the first quarter of 2022 from the previous year and accounted for 15% of all openings in the country—the highest share of any sector, according to Statistics Canada data.

Here are some recent accomplishments from our collaborations with some of Canada’s most innovative hospitals and healthcare systems:

1. Cambridge Memorial Hospital

Cambridge Memorial Hospital (CMH), located in Cambridge, Ontario launched SeamlessMD in early 2022 to digitally support patients undergoing Hip and Knee surgery. On the partnership, Rob Howe, Director of Digital Health at Cambridge Memorial Hospital shared:

“SeamlessMD is a very user-friendly platform that provides patients with comprehensive patient education to facilitate more effective self-management at home. This allows health care providers to redistribute their time and expertise more effectively. With the convenient access to their care teams, patients experience improved compliance and fewer post-surgical complications.”

Read the full press release for more details on the initial launch of SeamlessMD at CMH.

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2. Cornwall Community Hospital

Located in Cornwall, Ontario, Cornwall Community Hospital (CCH) recently became the first hospital in Canada to integrate SeamlessMD with its Cerner Electronic Health Record (EHR) using SMART on FHIR technology – the latest EHR interoperability framework. This integration allows CCH to streamline patient enrollment and monitoring on SeamlessMD from right within the Cerner patient chart. They are implementing SeamlessMD across Total Hip and Knee Replacement, Shoulder, Breast, Colorectal, and for all Emergent General Surgery. Access the full press release here to learn more about the exciting integration.

3. Grand River Hospital

Located in Kitchener, Ontario, Grand River Hospital (GRH) was the first hospital in Southeastern Ontario to implement SeamlessMD to expand access to care from home and minimize in-person surgery visits in response to the pandemic. One GRH patient shared:

“I feel it comforting to know that there is a caring team out there that is following our recovery progress. I’m sure it has saved on many calls to a doctor’s office or trips to the emergency department."

Read the launch story here to learn more on how GRH used SeamlessMD to support patients undergoing Hip and Knee replacement surgery.

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4. Health Sciences North

Health Sciences North (HSN) in Sudbury, Ontario celebrated a milestone at the end of 2021, having enrolled more than 1,000 patients onto SeamlessMD to support 10 different types of surgeries including: Orthopedics, Breast Cancer, Open Heart Surgery, ICD/Pacemaker, Colorectal and Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) surgery. At the time of the story’s release, 93 percent of HSN patients using the app reported the platform had helped them feel more confident before surgery. Additionally, 92 percent of patients reported that they feel more confident during their at-home-stay. Read more on the ongoing success of the partnership here.

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5. North Bay Regional Health Centre

In early 2022, North Bay Regional Health Centre (NBRHC) launched SeamlessMD to enhance the delivery of its Hip, Knee, Colorectal and Hysterectomy surgery programs. Chantal Gagne, Director of Surgery and Inpatient Services at NBRHC shared her thoughts on the partnership thus far:

“SeamlessMD has been a terrific partner in helping us deliver our hospital’s strategy to provide a cutting edge, digital experience throughout the patient journey to ultimately reduce ED visits, hospital length of stay, and readmission rates,”

Read the press release for the full highlights of how  the hospital is using SeamlessMD to mitigate the COVID-19 surgical backlog while providing more proactive, convenient care for patients going forward.

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6. North York General Hospital

Recently, North York General Hospital (NYGH) in Toronto, Ontario launched SeamlessMD to support patients undergoing Hip, Knee and Colorectal surgery. Dr. Lloyd Smith, Chief of Surgery and Program Medical Co-Director at North York General Hospital shared:

“During the global pandemic, we saw the benefits of leveraging digital technologies to deliver timely, seamless and enhanced care to patients. We are excited to partner with SeamlessMD to offer an innovative tool that will empower our patients every step of the surgical journey, and enable our teams to track their recovery at home to mitigate possible issues that could result in a visit to the emergency room.”

Read the full launch story here.

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7. Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) located in Barrie, Ontario joined other leading Canadian healthcare organizations earlier this year with the launch of SeamlessMD to digitally support patients undergoing Hip, Knee and Shoulder surgery. RVH Surgery Program Medical Director Dr. John Rissanen commented:

“The app allows our patients to receive focused education at the right time in their surgical journey,” says RVH Surgery Program Medical Director Dr. John Rissanen. “This will help patients manage their surgical recovery with the ongoing support of their surgeon and other health care providers via SeamlessMD.”

Learn more about RVH’s implementation of SeamlessMD here.

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8. Sault Area Hospital

Earlier this year, Sault Area Hospital (SAH) in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario became the first healthcare system in North America to launch SeamlessMD to remotely monitor patients through their Mental Health and Addictions (MH&A) care journey.

On the initiative, Dr. James Chan, Director of Innovation at Sault Area Hospital shared:

‍“We are thrilled to partner with SeamlessMD to develop an efficient and effective way to support mental health and addictions patients. With the technology, providers can monitor patients/clients on dashboards in real-time, allowing for personalized care recommendations and quicker intervention from the care team if necessary. Additionally, people are given the tools to effectively self-manage from home, thus empowering individuals to more actively participate in their own healthcare.”

Prior to using the technology for this specific use case, SAH had already partnered with SeamlessMD to engage and monitor patients undergoing 12 specific surgeries across several departments (Orthopedics, General Surgery, Urology and OB/GYN). Read more about SAH and their use of the platform to support MH&A here.

9. St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton

In early 2022, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton (SJHH) in Hamilton, Ontario became the the first health system in Canada to deliver a fully-integrated Digital Patient Experience through a SMART on FIHR integration connecting Dovetale (Epic), MyDovetale (Epic MyChart), and SeamlessMD. In 2020, SJHH launched SeamlessMD with personalized digital care journeys for surgery (e.g. Orthopedics), and has since extended the use of digital care journeys for patients having Bariatric surgery, withThyroid surgery soon to follow.

Andriana Lukich, Director of Digital Solutions at SJHH shared:

“We are thrilled to be the first healthcare organization in Canada to leverage SMART on FHIR technology to launch a Dovetale (Epic) and MyDovetale (MyChart) integrated digital patient experience with SeamlessMD. This allows patients to easily access SeamlessMD from their patient portal account, and for providers to remotely monitor patients from right within the EMR. Hip, knee, shoulder, bariatric, and thyroid surgical patients on the program are also being remotely monitored daily for 30 days post-discharge by a team of nurses, helping the care team to catch complications quicker and then intervene if necessary.”

Ms. Lukich also guest-starred on “The Digital Patient” podcast and shared her thoughts on how COVID-19 has shifted the conversation within Digital Health teams to focus on patient engagement as well as cybersecurity.

Data from 2021 showed that 92% of patients at SJHH recommended SeamlessMD 15 days post-surgery, and 33% of patients reporting that the platform helped them avoid phone calls to the hospital. 85% of patients also expressed that SeamlessMD helped them feel less worried about self-managing from home. Access the full story here.

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10. Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre‍

Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) in Thunder Bay, Ontario achieved a hospital-wide rollout of SeamlessMD in 16 months across 14 clinical areas including: Shoulder, Total Hip and Knee, Spine (Lumbar and Cervical), Cardiac Catheterization, Bariatrics, Colorectal, Urology, Gynecology, Breast Cancer, Maternity Care, Oncology. Initial results from almost 1,900 surgical patients supported by SeamlessMD have demonstrated:

• ↓1.2 days average Length of Stay (LOS)
• ↓32% 30-day ED Visits
• 90% Patient Activation Rate
• 91% of patients felt more confident before surgery
• 97% of patients felt more confident at home after surgery

Read the case study to learn more on how TBRHSC achieved these results.

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11. William Osler Health System

William Osler Health System (WOHS) partnered with SeamlessMD in 2021 for patients undergoing elective emergency surgery. At the time of the launch story, more than 2500 patients had enrolled on the platform, with 90 percent of patients recommending SeamlessMD to others to help manage their health at home following their in-hospital procedures. The platform supports multiple languages including English, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian and French, prominent in Osler’s diverse communities. Learn more about Osler’s partnership with SeamlessMD here.

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In addition to the aforementioned hospitals, SeamlessMD has formed impactful relationships with other Canadian healthcare organizations including: Brant Community Health System, Chatham Kent Health Alliance, Michael Garron Hospital, Montreal Heart Institute, Muskoka Algonquin Healthcare, Niagara Health, Nova Scotia Health Authority, Quinte Health Care, SE Health, Sinai Health, Sunnybrook, Timmins and District Hospital, ​​Trillium Health Partners, and Unity Health. Learn more about our partnerships with Canadian hospitals to deliver safer, higher-quality care.

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