http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6845578-mohawk-college-to-be-a-major-driver-of-health-technology/ 

GOVERNMENT OF CANADA INVESTING IN REGION’S FIRST DIGITAL HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ACCESS CENTRE AT MOHAWK

HAMILTON, ON (September 7, 2016) – Mohawk College is launching the region’s first Technology Access Centre for Digital Health to support innovation, adoption and commercialization of digital technology into the healthcare sector.

Filomena Tassi, Member of Parliament for Hamilton West – Ancaster – Dundas, today announced the Government of Canada’s $1.75 million investment over five years in Mohawk’s Technology Access Centre with a College and Community Innovation Program Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Set to open in January 2017, Mohawk’s Technology Access Centre in Digital Health will draw on the expertise of more than 30 faculty, staff and students working in the college’s award-winning mHealth and eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC). The team will work with small and medium-size companies to design, build, test and implement digital health technologies and also deliver customized training.

Digital health uses informational technology and electronic communication tools, services and processes to deliver health care services in new ways.

QUOTES:

“I am thrilled to make this major funding announcement for Mohawk College today. This grant is proof that Mohawk is a college on the move. The funding will help Mohawk continue to build its dynamic presence as a leading Ontario centre for innovation in e-health and mobile health, as well as contribute to our economy by offering innovative opportunities to small and medium sized businesses in our region and around the province. I am so happy for the hard-working faculty, students and staff at Mohawk College." – MP Hamilton West – Ancaster – Dundas Filomena Tassi

“We are proud to invest in Canadian colleges and CÉGEPs that are at the forefront of applied research and technological innovation. This unique program supports R&D excellence and invests in the next generation of highly skilled innovators. By deepening interactions between the college community and businesses we’re helping local companies increase their R&D capacity, access new technologies and boost their competitiveness.” – Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada President Dr. B. Mario Pinto

“The Government of Canada’s $1.75 million investment in the region’s first Technology Access Centre for Digital Health will allow Mohawk to share our wealth of expertise with even more college partners. Our team will help companies bring innovative digital health solutions into homes and hospitals, create new jobs, further develop the skills of our students and help build healthier communities.” – Mohawk College President Ron McKerlie

“Mohawk’s Technology Access Centre will bridge the gap between small and medium-size companies and our healthcare system. Our centre will give these companies full access to our talent, technology and our connections to more than 1,000 digital health professionals from around the world.” - Mohawk College Director of Digital Health Applied Research Duane Bender

FAST FACTS:

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada awarded $32.7 million in College and Community Innovation Program Grants to 32 applied research projects at colleges across Canada.

The Government of Canada has invested more than $4.3 million in Mohawk’s mHealth and eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC).

Mohawk ranks among the top 20 colleges in Canada for applied research activity and has set a goal of being among the top 10 colleges within the next five years. Mohawk is recognized as a leader in applied research in digital health technology, additive manufacturing and energy.

MEDIC was established in 2007 and has worked with more than 60 private, public and non-profit sector partners in 10 countries. Partners include Canada Health Infoway, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, eHealth Ontario and PATH, an international health organization

MEDIC faculty and staff have educated approximately 700 Mohawk students through co-op work terms, capstone projects and classroom instruction.

MEDIC was a finalist for PwC’s (formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers) 2016 Vision to Reality Innovator of the Year Award and received a Canada Health Infoway  Standards Collaborative Team Peer Award in 2010.

Mohawk is a member of the Synapse Life Science Consortium, which includes St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton Health Sciences, McMaster University, the City of Hamilton, Innovation Factory, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and the Bay Area Health Trust.

Hamilton’s health service and research sector is the city’s largest employer, with more than 1,350 healthcare, information technology, software and medical equipment and device manufacturers in the region.

CONTACTS:

Jay Robb, Mohawk College Director of Communications, 905.979.8893, jay.robb@mohawkcollege.ca

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Mohawk College educates and serves 30,000 full-time, part-time and apprenticeship students at three campuses in Hamilton, Ontario. Mohawk has been ranked number one in student satisfaction among all colleges in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area for six consecutive years and number one in graduate satisfaction for the past four years.

The annual awards recognize companies that display creative thinking and innovation in the development of a new product, service, process, partnership or campaign. Nominees must be able to prove that their innovation is having an impact on the business. The innovation must be proven, measured and reported through revenue or other key performance indicators. Nominees must also be headquartered in Canada.

The winners will be announced at an awards celebration in Toronto later this month.

It was to take something of the bitter sting out of this equation that the mHealth & eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC) at the college partnered in an intricately connected international project to build better health data in Tanzania.

The East African country was taken on as a lead project of the ‘Better Immunization Data Initiative,’ one of the high-profile ‘pathbreaking solutions’ for global health funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, designed to give affordable and reliable health technology a greater reach.

MEDIC joined an international team gathered for the BID Initiative in Tanzania: IntraHealth International (USA), AIRIS Solutions (Albania), ecGroup (Canada), and the Tanzanian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW). At the centre was PATH, a widely respected international nonprofit organization tasked to develop and deliver health innovations in vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, devices, and systems.

Routine immunizations and new vaccine introductions have proven to be two of the best investments to improve health around the world. And as the BID Initiative notes, even though current immunization ratesin Africa have climbed to near 75 percent, it will require much more “awareness, accessibility, and availability” to reach and protect the last 25 percent.

But how do health providers know which of the three A’s matter most, and in which areas? Data. Or, more precisely, better data that will inform better health decisions, and so produce better health. Once that better data is on hand, there must also be better ways found to share and manage it. This is the portion of the mHealth equation in Tanzania that MEDIC researchers at Mohawk set themselves to solve.

INTEROPERABILITY: ALL TOGETHER NOW

Tanzania is perhaps the paradigm case for eHealth in Africa, says Justin Fyfe, the Software Architect at Mohawk College who was lead on the Tanzania project. “Although network readiness lags in Tanzania, the eHealth project will look ahead, to take some advantage of the rapid convergence of information and communications technology.”

“Our work was to create an electronic immunization registry in Tanzania. The registry had to operate within the OpenHIE framework [Open Health Information Exchange, a set of freely agreed-upon specifications within the international eHealth community on how to share and collaborate with data]. That meant we had to use global standards and open-source solutions, and be prepared to interoperate with many other health programs and systems,” said Fyfe, as he listed the requirements and challenges set out for MEDIC. “The framework we create for the immunization program must be designed to work reliably with other programs ... for Malaria, HIV, TB, family planning.”

The interoperability requirements in Tanzania are very broad, Fyfe goes on to explain. The registry has to work with paper records that move by motorbike courier between remote villages, millions of vaccination cards that remain with the parents of children, migrations and emergencies, and also manage stocks of medical supplies.

The national goal is to register all children from birth -- and there are more than two million births every year in Tanzania -- and follow each child so that all required vaccines are given on schedule. “Vaccination is not immunization,” Fyfe points out. “Vaccines are a medicine. They have to be timed right, given in a proper sequence, and follow a schedule to be effective.”

Where there is electricity and large numbers of patients -- in the cities, or district health centres --vaccinations can be registered with a computer or tablet. In remote areas, with no or only erratic electrical supply, registration can be done with ‘bubble paper.’ Vaccination and other health information is recorded as filled-in circles on standard forms, and the data captured via scans with mobile phones or simple devices -- the data simply and efficiently made acceptable by the larger electronic system. Each child is assigned a record with a barcode on the paper registry.

All the data must converge, says Fyfe, in a way that children can be included and followed accurately in the national immunization registry, and critical data can flow back to front-line workers and facilities to keep vaccines on schedule and coverage complete.

MEDIC worked quickly: only a few months after the kickoff meeting in mid-January 2015, the registry prototype began trials at selected locations in June in the Arusha Region in northern Tanzania. With tweaks from trial users incorporated, the registry will be rolled out to all 253 health facilities in the region throughout this year and into early 2016.

STANDARDS ARE NOT FUN

As MEDIC Director Duane Bender points out, “there were 124 requirements set out by PATH when it asked for software development services to create the Tanzanian immunization registry. It had to be easy to use in a ‘low-resource’ environment where data entry might be done via paper forms or mobile phones, yet also be accurate enough and robust enough to safely and efficiently manage the routine immunization of the approximately two million children born every year.”

It was the kind of challenge that software architects call ‘fun.’ Less fun, says Bender, is that the work had to be “disciplined” to use standards and open-source software already in operation. Where resources are scarce, system and software investments previously made have to be preserved.

But there is also a need to avoid ‘lock-in’ dependency on a particular product or vendor, Bender says, which might frustrate development of the ‘best’ software architecture or system solution. He adds, that it is in these environments that MEDIC excels, with its “teaming, tooling, testing and training” approach.

MEDIC works not just on the machine-readable instructions that direct computers, but on all the challenges -- technical, regulatory, or institutional -- that might constrain development of digital products or services. As Bender puts it: “We add team strength to projects with expertise in architecture and design. We test and detect problems to reduce time, cost, and risk -- the Tanzanian registry was test run with five million records and 80 simultaneous points of access. We form specialized knowledge into practical, tangible, and scalable tools. And we train. We are, after all, an educational institution. Our product is our capability, and our students.”

ROOM E103

Paul Brown is Research Project Manager (Software) of iDeaWORKS, the research and innovation department of Mohawk College, but he introduces himself to a visitor as “chief cat herder” of Room E103, the MEDIC collaboration workspace- reflecting the common belief that “Managing programmers is like herding cats.”

This article was originally published in the 2015 volume of Quanta, Mohawk College’s annual celebration of research and innovation.

Author Andrea Johnson is Promotions and Industry Liaison Officer for iDeaWORKS and the editor of Quanta.

By Blake Mancini

When you’re living in an age that is notorious for its dependence on smartphones and new technology- and where we face criticism for this dependency it’s often difficult to see the positive side of our reliance of technology. Every day, we are changing and modifying how we live our lives thanks to new apps and electronic devices that help us with banking, checking the weather and most recently, keeping up to date on our health.

Mobile health, or mHealth as it is also known, is having a big effect on how we, as consumers, track our own health - and its affecting the industry immensely. From wearable devices such as Fitbits, and smartphone tools such as Apple’s “Health “ application, keeping track of your health while has become easier than ever.

Michael Shreve, the director of Health Information Systems at the MedicAlert Foundation of Canada, believes that mobile health is going to have a dramatic effect on how healthcare is delivered.

“Right now, mobile health applications are consumer centric tools to help individuals track or monitor their health,” says Shreve. “Wearables tracking devices are provided by some advanced healthcare settings to track outpatient or post-op health. Over time devices and applications wlll merge and will be able to provide both the individual and or their caregiver instant access to their current state of health.”

“Wearables have greatly increased the ability to capture diagnostic information, and as smartphones evolve, many of these sensors will become standard features of newer phones.”

The MedicAlert Foundation is a Canadian charity that maintains over one million Canadian health records for first responders. In 2015, Mohawk College’s mHealth & eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC) worked with the MedicAlert Foundation of Canada to create an app, available for iPhones and Android, which pushes boundaries in the field of mobile health. Intended for first responders in the field, the app allows them easy access to MedicAlert member information.

Shreve says that the application will have a positive impact on the way first responders handle patients while in the field, with a few quick clicks paramedics will be able to see the Member’s full record,

“MedicAlert believes that first responders can deliver better and quicker care if they know the health concerns of the individual. This application will allow MedicAlert to provide first responders with easier and simpler access to our member information.”

Currently, the information is only available via the 24/7 MedicAlert telephone hotline, where trained professionals have access to over a million electronic health records. With the introduction to the new app, paramedics can access the information on their device instead of having to listen to an operator and take notes.

The app is different from other healthcare applications because of its efficiency in delivering MedicAlert’s member’s information to first responders.

“There are other applications that collect and display medical records for both the patient and first responders,” states Shreve. “However, our application is focused soley on the needs of first responders who are providing emergency care, and will be rolled out to paramedics as a view-only tool.”

Working with Shreve on the project was Tara Oskam, an Advanced Diploma Software Development student at Mohawk College and a co-op student at MEDIC.

She considers the way the app was designed as a very important feature.

“We used high contrast colours so the application was easy to read and large buttons because paramedics generally wear gloves. Also, everything is accessible within two or three button clicks, because when you’re in an emergency you want to act quickly.”

“Great care was taken with the user experience design to ensure that paramedics would find the interface intuitive and easy to use,” says Shreve. “Patient information is organized for them by importance, and visual clues are given to let them know whether or not a patient has allergies, medications or special needs.”

According to Oskam, this app is a phenomenal example of how mHealth is beginning to affect the world of digital health and health care.

“Let’s say someone is incoherent and couldn’t tell paramedics what their allergies are, but are severely allergic to a certain pain medication, now the paramedic would know that and wouldn’t administer it on the way to the hospital,” explains Oskam.

“That could save someone’s life.”

But what exactly does the future of mHealth hold? It has already begun to changed the world of healthcare, and according to Shreve, will continue to do so exponentially over the next several years..

“mHealth will enable a dramatic shift in how healthcare will be delivered in the future,” says Shreve.

“Think doctor in your pocket.”

About the author:

Blake Mancini is final year student in Mohawk College’s Journalism program. He is completing his internship with iDeaWORKS, Mohawk’s department of applied research and innovation. 

Mohawk is one of 17 colleges, cégeps and polytechnics from across Canada to share in $15.3 million in funding in support of applied research projects with more than 300 industry partners.

"Canada's colleges, cégeps and polytechnics play an important role as we forge ahead with Canada's innovation agenda," said Minister of State Gary Goodyear. "Innovation needs to be a central focus - from the research laboratory to the production floor. It is the key to maintaining our country's position as a global economic leader."

"Canadian colleges are lending their expertise to local companies, helping them to compete and grow," said Dr. Gilles G. Patry, CFI President and CEO. "The CFI is ensuring that colleges have in place specialized facilities to support their role as important hubs of economic growth and job creation."

"The Mohawk eHEalth Development and Innovation Centre will help businesses, with a special focus on small and medium enterprises, to launch and commercialize innovative new healthcare IT products and services," said Ted Scott, Mohawk's Chief Innovation Officer. "MEDIC will also serve as a hub for organizations undertaking interconnected healthcare projects. Our centre will house the technology needed to provide clients with a live, working eHealth ecosystem, plus the know-how and industry contacts they'll need to develop and commercialize new eHealth products."