MEDIC is changing health care around the world

Mohawk College’s mHealth and eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC) is changing health care around the world to the benefit of patients and practitioners.

Since 2007, staff and students working at MEDIC have helped government organizations, not-for-profits, and businesses develop and implement innovative digital health solutions to improve patient care all over the world.

It started with the creation of the Client Registry, a system that identifies and aggregates all parts of a patient’s health care history, providing practitioners with a detailed picture of the people they treat. The open-source software is used throughout the world, including close to home by eHealth Ontario.

MEDIC also created a tool for developers to communicate more easily in eHealth Ontario’s development environment, facilitating the process of improving digital health software. Called Everest, it reduces the time developers need to learn digital health software architecture language before doing meaningful work to improve the system.

MEDIC hasn’t stopped there. Here are three ways one of Mohawk’s crown jewels is improving health care across the globe:

MEDIC makes it easier for digital health companies to launch their products in Ontario.

You’ve built the perfect Health IT product and it’s functioning perfectly in your tests. But will it work when it is being deployed in one of Ontario’s 463 hospitals?

That’s the question that eHealth Ontario and MEDIC wanted to answer when they collaborated to build the eHealth Ontario Innovation Lab. The online, open-access platform, helps health care companies test their products in a virtual environment, ensuring that their innovative new product will work in tandem with a patient’s electronic health record (EHR).

MEDIC’s team of software developers and network engineers built and continue to host the test environment, which includes patient records set up with dummy data to simulate the 14.57 million Ontarians. With the Innovation Lab, it’s possible for companies to quickly scale their product to serve the entire province, troubleshooting their products before they are deployed to hospitals and clinics. The result? Better technology and better patient care.

MEDIC supported digital health in Tanzania.

Immunization records also got a boost in Tanzania, thanks to a partnership between MEDIC and PATH, a global leader in health innovation. The project, funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, helps clinics in the largely rural country to manage vaccination supplies and patient reporting for 500,000 children and counting.

It also overcomes issues with Internet in rural and remote settings. The digital system enables practitioners to work offline. Patient and vaccination stock data is synched once a month, making it shareable between other eHealth systems in Tanzania. Clinics have been equipped with solar power charging systems for tablets to ensure patient and vaccination supply information can always be recorded electronically.

MEDIC is ensuring the sustainability of the system by training Tanzanian software developers to operate and change it as needed, building capacity in the country so that they have sustainable solutions.

MEDIC is Canada’s only Technology Access Centre in Digital Health.

In 2016, MEDIC has received Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) funding to assist small and medium digital health enterprises with innovation. Thanks to this funding that has allowed Mohawk to host Canada’s only Technology Access Centre (TAC) in Digital Health, MEDIC can develop digital health software, test solutions developed by other businesses, provide training, and host events like Apps for Health and FHIR North. Since its founding, over 400 companies from across Canada have come to MEDIC to leverage their testing, tooling, teaming and training services, and take their products from idea to commercialization.