The Brampton Civic Hospital is designed around state-of-the-art medical support and diagnostic equipment.

For the first time in her 21 years as a nurse, Sharon Fairclough can use a hand-held computer to contact a co-worker.

Health workers hold the handheld computers that give them a connection to colleagues and patient information no matter where they are in the hospital.

"Before, let's say I was looking for someone — I'd have to run around from room to room, or call another floor and ask someone to look for them," says Fairclough, a peritoneal dialysis nurse at Brampton Civic Hospital (BCH), which opened last Sunday and accepted 234 patients from the temporarily closing Peel Memorial Hospital. "With this, I am directly in touch with the person I need."

Her wireless personal digital assistant (PDA) also lets her quickly address emergencies or respond to the calls of the more than 100 daily outpatients in the dialysis unit.

"It's definitely an improvement — it's enabling us to be much more efficient and to better serve our patients," she says.

One of three hospitals comprising the William Osler Health Centre (WOHC) northwest of Toronto, BCH is billed as Canada's first "e-health centre." The high-tech hospital took three years to build, in collaboration with more than 30 technology companies. The 1.3 million-square-foot, $790-million facility is loaded with technological innovations that hospital administrators say are designed to lead to faster, better health care.

"This truly is the way of the future in health care," says Judy Middleton, chief information officer at WOHC. "Technology is really the enabler of better health care. It enables clinicians to more readily have the required information to expedite care and make better informed decisions."

New approach to care

BCH is one of the first hospitals in Canada to be designed, built, financed and maintained under a private-public partnership involving the Healthcare Infrastructure Company of Canada, a development consortium consisting of EllisDon, Carillion and Borealis Infrastructure.

In the hospital's emergency department, Dr. Naveed Mohammad says easier access to patient information is helping him better treat his patients and track their progress. With the new security system, with the swipe of his thumb Mohamad accesses an advanced software program called PICIS that lets him record tests he's ordered, review treatments performed by nurses, and note information such as patients' allergies to medications.

The system, that is also being used in the peri-operative and critical care departments, also issues alerts if a patient has been in the emergency room for more than 12 hours, then again at 24 hours.

Health records the Brampton Civic Hospital are digitized to give medical staff more efficient access to patient information.

"This system puts all the information we need at our fingertips — it runs the whole department," says Mohamad, chief of emergency medicine, whose department has 69 beds and accommodates about 220 people each day. "I can find data on any patient at any given time. It makes us more efficient, there's more time saving and it gives us a lot more accountability."

He says it will take about eight weeks for ER staff to adapt to the new system, and about six months for the department to go entirely paperless. The latter is part of the hospital's goal to fully embrace electronic health records within a year, a plan Mohamad avidly endorses.

"In the old days, I would tell a nurse I need a chart, she would request it, health records would look for it — sometimes they couldn't find it, sometimes they could. If they could, then we'd have to find a porter to walk to health records and get it," he says. "Now, with just a click on the computer, you instantly get all of a client's information, old blood work, old cardiograms — everything. The paper chart system involved a lot more labour — this is a much better system."

Sharon Sholzberg-Gray, president of the Canadian Healthcare Association — the federation of provincial and territorial hospital and health organizations across Canada — is optimistic about the way high-tech hospitals like BCH will transform the health-care landscape.

"New technologies in hospitals over the last 20 years or so have really created a lot of cost savings and better outcomes [for patients]," she says. "They have enabled us to have things like day surgery for complex conditions, better anesthetics and less invasive procedures. If technology enables hospitals to be more efficient and effective and take care of more people for less money, then that's a good direction for health care to take in Canada."

Focus on automation

Self-serve kiosks are designed to speed up the registration process for patients arriving at the hospital. A person registers by swiping their health card into the ATM-like machines, which function in six different languages, and they can then print a map that will direct them to the right department.

This new direction is obvious to people the minute they walk through the doors of the new 479-bed hospital (608 beds at full capacity). That's when they encounter self-serve kiosks that function in six different languages; once they register by swiping their health cards into the ATM-like machines, they can choose to print a map that will direct them to the right department. While waiting, visitors can pull out their laptops and take advantage of the hospital's wall-to-wall WiFi wireless network coverage.

"The benefit is that instead of having to stand in line to register, a patient is empowered to come in, swipe their card, and take a seat while they wait for treatment," Fairclough says. "Because it's all automated, it helps us to more effectively process new patients."

An innovation that patients will not get to see, but which may affect their visit, is the "drug robot," an auto-dispensing medication system toiling away in the hospital's basement. Called PillPick, the machine can package, store and dispense up to 54,000 unit doses of medicine.

"It eliminates all the time-consuming manual labour we used to have to perform in preparing and packaging drugs," says Kim Kozluk, senior pharmacy technician. "It has also significantly decreased our rate of error, because it's easier to make mistakes by hand."

But technology alone is not the cure for what ails us, says Sholzberg-Gray of the CHA. When aging baby boomers with chronic conditions start using the system more, she says, they'll need as much hands-on personal care as they will technological tools.

"Technology is a crucial aspect of this equation," she says. "But I think quality patient care means a partnership between technology and direct care featuring holistic approaches to individuals."