Transformatics

The team’s successes lie in the breadth of our skillset and the commitment to driving projects from ideation to implementation. The team has built relationships with the many clinical, research and industry groups we’ve worked with, creating a reputation of excellence in rapid response, technology co-development, operations as and project initialization.

Joint Department of Medical Imaging AI Centre

Agata Misiura and Paige Gilbank each bring an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Translational Research focus to the work they do with the Joint Department of Medical Imaging AI Centre (JDMI AI). JDMI is a multi-site medical imaging department spanning three healthcare facilities and six individual hospital sites. The JDMI AI Centre includes research labs and centers, key hospital initiatives as well as industry. As part of the team, Agata and Paige bring their expertise in health informatics, translational research, big data and analytics, and eHealth to help spearhead the implementation and commercialization of new AI and ML algorithms and tools to be used and streamlined within the JDMI.

Cancer Digital Intelligence

https://pmcdi.ca/
Just last year, Cancer Digital Intelligence (CDI), a research and innovation program at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre was launched. CDI aims to cultivate an adaptive digital environment that accelerates the spread and scale of digital innovation. Within the program, our Transformatics team brings a wide skill set to projects on this side. Kelly Lane, Project Director of Operations & Projects at CDI manages the behind-the-scenes activities to ensure the program operates smoothly, keeping pulse on all active projects. She brings her strong strategic and project management expertise, honed by working in Canadian Health IT landscape to the table. Currently, there are 14 active projects within the program, all falling under key domains of business intelligence, discovery integration, care innovation, and data science and analytics.
On the care innovation side within CDI, as a Clinical Engineer, Melissa Kozak supports projects related to remote patient monitoring and asynchronous models of care to help support patients with various types of cancer at Princess Margaret. With a unique background in human factors engineering, Melissa works with stakeholders, internal and external vendors in building, testing, implementing and evaluating systems that consider the unique ways that humans, technologies and systems interact. With a background in Health Information Management with certifications in Scrum Master, SAFe, and Lean Green belt, Sharon Narine brings a strong technical lens to any project she is on, supporting the translation of data science research projects into clinical operations. Recently, she helped lead the Clinical Trial Integrated Matching System (CTIMS), a collaboration with Pugh Lab at Princess Margaret, to reduce the time and effort for research scientists to match eligible patients to clinical trials. Sharon also managed a project aiming to build an early warning system to predict toxicities in cancer patients. Sharon collaborates with multi-disciplinary teams to develop and promote innovative data science methods.
Paige Gilbank and Helena Hyams each bring health informatics, project management, research and business analysis, and even social media skills to the table. Paige and Helena support projects ranging from leading some of the external award’s CDI launches within the greater Princess Margaret community, including a Research Trainee award program, to some projects within the Data Science and Analytics domain. Alex Gergolas, the head designer for the Techna marketing team, brings a background and skill set in Media Information and Technoculture, as well as in interactive and media design to the team. On the CDI site, Alex helps with building out our website. On the Techna side, Alex works with our partners to build out websites, branding, logo creation, social media, and print design.

Rapid Access Clinics for Low Back Pain

https://www.lowbackrac.ca/
At the other end of the spectrum, the team supports all the operations of the Ontario Rapid Access Clinics for Low Back Pain. This provincial program consists of a network of physiotherapists and chiropractors from across the province specializing in low back pain, with referrals being processed by regional Central Intake Offices. Case management, from the point of referral processing through to clinical documentation, is facilitated by a case management system (CMS). Agata Misiura, Paige Gilbank, Linda Eum, and Kelly Lane provide support for the CMS end users and establish key standard operating procedures to support the use of the CMS. In fact, this past year, the team spearheaded the transition to a new case management system for all patient information, workflows, and clinician pathways. They successfully onboarded all 16 regions across Ontario onto a central shared cloud-based case management system with over 300 users. The program has received over 82,000 referrals since it started in 2018 and has onboarded over 8,600 primary care providers. The team engages in continuous improvement of the software by bringing testing, user feedback, and vendor development to implement optimizations to improve the end experience and access to care. As a registered nurse, Linda Eum brings a key focus on enhancing patient safety and care to the team.

Lean Process Improvement

Collaborating with Groups at the Sprott Department of Surgery and Schroeder Arthritis Institute

In partnership with the Sprott Department of Surgery, Agata Misiura, Linda Eum, Helena Hyams and members of Techna’s Surgility group applied a Lean process improvement framework to analyze workflows in the ORs, in Endoscopy and in endoscope reprocessing. The analysis work involved conducting an environmental scan and literature review, in-person process shadowing, and staff surveys (as needed). Similarly, Melissa Kozak, Helena Hyams, and Kelly Lane also use a Lean Process Improvement framework working with the Orthopedic and Fracture clinic groups at Toronto Western Hospital. Here, the team collaborates with front-line staff through shadowing as well as workshops with clinical staff to identify challenges in existing workflows and potential challenges with the technology systems used to collect and share patient information. In both Lean Projects, in-person shadowing allowed for the collection of key data points that were then analyzed using Lean tools, including value stream maps and spaghetti diagrams. This analysis helped to identify opportunities for efficiencies, which were synthesized in a report and presented to Leadership at the clinics.

Lean Six Sigma Certification and Training

Continuous learning is a core part of the team. Whether it be additional certifications to up current skill sets, courses, conferences, lunch-and-learns, or other educational events, the team always welcomes new opportunities. As a team, we have completed some of the Lean Six Sigma certifications. This way, we each apply a Lean process improvement perspective to all the projects we are part of, identifying how workflows can be made more efficient, and allow for seamless information sharing between technology processes, patients, and providers.