December 2004
E-Learning key in new patient-centered approach to health care
Few issues rival the importance of healthcare among Canadians. In today’s tight fiscal environment where much of the attention has been on the business side of healthcare, the Interprofessional Knowledge Building Project took a much-needed step toward putting the focus on patients—with a lot of help from communal database technology called Knowledge Forum.
In 2002, when Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) made the decision to take a serious look at developing a new and improved model of patient-centered care, they had no illusions about the amount of work that would be involved.
The first challenge was to learn in detail what patients and their families felt were important to their care. That would eventually mean undertaking over 600 surveys and focus groups to find out what mattered most to patients and their families, applying state-of-the-art consumer preference modeling in a health care context.
All this data had to be distributed to HHS’s 30-member Patient Centered Care (PCC) task force, analysed and discussed in a timely fashion before the task force could even begin to develop their new model of service.
Furthermore, interprofessional collaboration is generally recognized as being crucial to developing better patient-centered care.
Since, the task force deliberately included representatives from a cross-section of health care professions at HHS, it was essential that the collaborative environment be conducive to a productive knowledge-building process among its members. Added to these challenges were serious logistical obstacles that had to be overcome.
HHS incorporates five hospitals across the city of Hamilton with 10,000 staff, physicians and volunteers and members of the Patient Centered Care (PCC) task force worked at different sites and even different shifts, and it was clearly not practical to rely on face-to-face meetings.
The Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology (IKIT) at the University of Toronto offered a practical alternative. IKIT’s interest and expertise in developing online knowledge-building communities and its Knowledge Forum communal database technology, proved to be the perfect solution for the PCC task force’s needs.
IKIT worked with the PCC task force to create an e-learning community, set e-learning goals and objectives, and analyse collaborative learning and knowledge construction processes; it also provided consultation around design, implementation and evaluation of effective e-learning strategies.
This collaboration between IKIT and HHS resulted in the Interprofessional Knowledge Building Project, an active and dynamic networked e-learning environment that provided much more flexible sharing and analysis of information than traditional one-way communication technologies such as e-mail and voice-mail. The result was a seamless integration of administrative and knowledge management activities, and vastly improved turn-around times for collaborative work.
“Healthcare providers, like market researchers, have to be able to gather information very quickly and efficiently and turn the information around rapidly,” said Dr. Chuck Cunningham, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and Jack Laidlaw Chair in Patient-Centered Health Care at McMaster, and a member of the PCC task force. “Utilization of formal consumer based research modeling methods in a broadband Internet methodology enabled us to do that.”
Because HSS is committed to sharing their findings with other hospitals across Ontario and Canada, advances made, as part of this e-learning initiative will have far-reaching consequences beyond the two million patients and families served by HSS in southwestern Ontario.
Design ideas and innovative practices yielded from this collaborative enterprise underscore the need for broadband technology and HHS are already thinking about new ways to apply collaborative online technology in day-to-day work, education and research.
http://ikit.org/intkb and www.knowledgeforum.com
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