Feature Story

June 24, 2008

Challenge

Located in downtown Toronto, Sherbourne Health Centre offers primary healthcare, counseling, support, outreach, health promotion, and education to the diverse communities in its neighbourhood. Offering clinical service since 2003, the centre has worked to bridge healthcare gaps that go unfilled by other healthcare programs. Sherbourne places special emphasis on serving local residents; homeless and underhoused individuals; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and transgendered communities; and new Canadians. In 2007, Sherbourne had almost 7,000 registered clients and delivered services to more than 50,000 contacts.

Sherbourne's facilities include a family health care clinic, a floor for mental health and youth counseling services, an infirmary, and two buses that travel throughout downtown serving homeless patients.

For its mobile program, Sherbourne's original plan was to offer patients visiting the health buses anonymous healthcare. However, the feedback that the centre received suggested that anonymous healthcare was not as effective as records-based healthcare. Without records, homeless patients were required to re-tell their histories repeatedly.

Before Sherbourne began offering clinical services in 2003, the centre decided that it would be a paperless facility, relying on Electronic Health Records (EHR), digital documents that record a patient's health history.

"Electronic Health Records help our clinicians make better decisions," says Brad Harrington, Sherbourne's CIO. "They have access to better information more quickly than they would with paper-based records. Because paper records cannot be easily transferred between various departments in a health centre, they can be a source of anxiety for patients with psychiatric disorders. Now a patient's history is right at our staff's fingertips, without us having to stress patients to recount it or trust their recall."

To support a solid EHR system, Sherbourne required a rock-solid network infrastructure at an affordable cost, because its IT budget was limited due to major building renovations going on at the same time.

Network Solution

Cisco recognized the important role that Sherbourne was playing in providing quality healthcare to the diverse communities in its area and stepped forward with a donation. That donation included a pair of 48-port Cisco® Catalyst® 3750 switches, which connect the centre's EHR and infirmary software servers to workstations throughout the facility's four floors. The centre also has Cisco wireless access points providing wireless coverage throughout the building and over 100 Cisco Unified IP phones.

"We knew we needed a company with a great track record if we wanted to offer a critical service like EHR, and Cisco certainly fit the bill," Harrington says. "We've had exceptional success with the EHR deployment, and a lot of that is attributable to the stability and security of our Cisco equipment."

Even the centre's vans are able to take advantage of the EHR system. Each van has a pair of laptops equipped with wireless network cards that connect to Bell Canada's Evolution Data Only (EVDO) wireless data network and back into the centre's Cisco backbone.

Cisco Gold certified partner UNIS LUMIN helped Sherbourne install the equipment.

"Sherbourne Health Centre fills a critical and challenging need for the constituents they serve," says Edwin Lukach, account manager for UNIS LUMIN. "Helping Sherbourne to develop their vision for the role that IT could play in helping them address this challenge has been very satisfying for our entire team. We look forward to assisting Sherbourne as they continue to leverage their IT infrastructure and expand their service capabilities."

"We've been very pleased with the performance of our Cisco network," Harrington says. "Our EHR system is only as strong as the infrastructure supporting it, and we believe we've got the strongest infrastructure available in place."

Now Sherbourne is able to track and process its patients, whether they come into the centre through the family healthcare clinic, the health buses, or the infirmary. In the future, Sherbourne hopes to enhance its EHR system to allow patients to access some of their own medical records, or perhaps book their appointments online. "We're not there yet, but that's where we want to go," Harrington says. "With the technology we have in place, we're confident we can get there."

Business Results

The homeless population in Toronto has grown in recent years, so having mobile health clinics that can provide effective care to the homeless through EHR was crucial for the health centre. Before the launch of the mobile health clinics, many of the homeless living near Sherbourne had not been receiving any healthcare at all. "Our vision was to have patients connected to all aspects of the health system, and through our network and EHR, we've been able to achieve that," Harrington says.

With the EHR system in place, healthcare practitioners are able to access vital patient information more quickly than in a paper-based environment. They're also able to serve patients more effectively, because they can be sure they're working from the most recent and up-to-date health records, rather than an outdated paper document. "The EHR gives us all the information we need," Harrington says. "We can see when they've last seen a doctor and what medications they've been on. And the patients are happy that they don't need to repeat all of their past medical history at every visit."