North Bay CTC collaborates on Information Technology
Friday, June 22, 2007 -- Michelle Strutzenberger
The children’s treatment centre (CTC) and district hospital in North Bay have recently begun to share services on several fronts. “It’s just a make-sense arrangement,” says Judy Sharpe, executive director of One Kids Place (OKP).
The two organizations have worked together quite closely over the past several years.
North Bay General Hospital (NBGH) was instrumental in assisting OKP to become established and sponsored the centre prior to it becoming an independent corporation in 2005.
Sharpe says hospital and CTC staff worked collaboratively to identify opportunities for integration. They pegged information system support as one of two areas on which they could collaborate.
OKP is interested in flowing the bulk of its resources into front-line rehabilitation services, she says. It just made sense to purchase the information system support from a partner organization like the hospital.
“Partnering with an agency was the most cost effective and would certainly provide us with the best information system support,” she says, noting that NBGH has its own information technology (IT) department, something the CTC could never replicate.
Glenn Scanlan, senior vice-president, corporate and support services, says the partnership is a win-win situation.
“The opportunity it provides us is to assist an allied health partner with some technological support,” he says. “They don’t need a lot but it works out that they provide us with a reasonable funding envelope to provide them with the services they require.”
An IT technician from the hospital is onsite at OKP two days a week and spends a half-day at the hospital addressing the centre’s IT needs. The organizations dovetail on existing equipment at the hospital, “maximizing the financial commitment from a technology point of view,” according to Scanlan.
He says the relationship also offers the centre access to the hospital’s IT resource pool as a whole.
“That’s definitely a good bang for your buck. Depending on what they need, we would send the appropriate person over, which is a big plus. It’s hard to get that level of support out in the private sector, to find someone who has that breadth of experience and of course has that health care knowledge.”
The partnership has been in place for about a year now, with the expectation of a long-term contract.
Sharpe notes that information technology is a key factor in service delivery for OKP, which is based in northeastern Ontario. The area the centre serves is quite large geographically.
“Technology brings us closer to the children and family we serve and it helps our therapists keep connected to their home base,” she says.
The CTC has a Web-based client information management system, allowing therapists to access client information wherever they are, at school, from their homes, and any of the OKP offices.
“Because we are one of the newer CTCs we had the opportunity to embrace the technology and we had the operating dollars to put those systems in place,” says Sharpe. “Certainly it’s been critical to our success.”
Part one of a series
