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Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, a critical care and palliative care physician at The Ottawa Hospital, came looking for ideas to improve ways to get patients out of the hospital.
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Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, who heads up the ICU department at The Ottawa Hospital, was at Monday’s Frontlines and Founders event, hosted by Bruyère Health. He came looking for ideas to improve ways to get patients out of the hospital. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIAArticle content
“We have all seen the use of emergency and how some patients are waiting forever to be seen. We have that same problem in ICU (the intensive care unit) trying to get our patients out. We have the same problem in the OR (operating rooms at post-anesthesia care units where patients go after surgery).”
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Finding an efficient way to optimize patient flow, he said, would make a big difference to wait times and use of space at the hospital.
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Kyeremanteng noted that Toronto’s Humber River Health was known for doing just that.
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It has created what has been called a NASA-style “mission control” room that uses real-time information and AI to improve patient flow and reduce wait times throughout the hospital, saving the equivalent of dozens of hospital beds that would otherwise be occupied, according to the hospital.
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A similar use of technology to solve challenges at The Ottawa Hospital and elsewhere “could be such an opportunity,” he said.
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Bruyère, which organized the session, brought in some real-life examples of serious health-care challenges that were improved by researchers and entrepreneurs.
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Melissa Guthrie demonstrates the innovative ALTA Platform, which is a robotic patient transfer device that glides a patient from a bed in seconds without hardly any movement at all. Bruyère helped develop the device and was the first hospital in the world to use it, in 2023. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIAArticle content
That includes the robotic patient transfer device called the ALTA Platform created by Jayiesh Singh, CEO and co-founder of Able Innovations. Singh and his team created a prototype for the robotic device at Carleton University. Bruyère Health was the first health organization to start using the device, which can do patient transfers at the touch of a button, reducing staff injuries and the stress of manual transfers. Singh was inspired, in part, by his mother’s stories of her job in long-term care.
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Representatives of Calgary-based Nano Tess were also on-site. The company created a wound-healing technology that helps wounds heal more than 56 per cent faster by harnessing the body’s natural healing processes. Use of the technology, which comes in the form of a salve, was piloted at Bruyère and is now used across the country and sold commercially. It is considered a game-changer for pressure sores and other wounds that can be dangerous and even deadly.
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Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who attended the event, said it was exciting to see the kind of collaboration going on between health-care leaders in Ottawa right now, especially at a time when the health-care system was facing a lot of challenges.
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