University Health Network, a Toronto-based healthcare and medical research organization, transformed its core hospital information system using Red Hat Integration to improve data accessibility across specialized patient care applications throughout the organization.
With an enhanced integration solution, University Health Network is able to connect previously disparate environments to consolidate, transport, and improve the security of critical healthcare data in support of better patient outcomes and clinical research needs.
University Health Network (UHN) is the largest hospital-based research center in Canada with 15 programs and hospitals. Like many other healthcare organizations, UHN has complex and disparate workflows that need to be met with specialized systems.
Patients often move through several different systems as they are transferred from the emergency department to other departments or facilities during the diagnosis and treatment processes. While patients are moved across departments and facilities, it’s imperative that their relevant medical data is accessible to authorized providers, regardless of the system they are using, to deliver improved patient care and make accurate diagnoses.
When its legacy IT systems neared end of life, UHN saw an opportunity to improve integration and data accessibility across its five major facilities, but needed a solution that provided the flexibility and configurability for UHN’s application developers and IT team to develop customized solutions to meet facility and patient needs.
To efficiently integrate more than 170 platforms and systems across its programs and facilities, UHN adopted Red Hat Fuse, part of Red Hat Integration. Red Hat Fuse is a distributed, container-based integration platform that connects everything from legacy systems and application programming interfaces (APIs) to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and more.
Red Hat Fuse enables UHN to improve data collection, delivery, and scalability, with less server downtime and integration management effort needed from their IT specialists. With the data moving smoothly within and between systems, UHN authorized care providers are able to access patient health records and medical research in one centralized location.
Implementing Red Hat Fuse has also enabled UHN’s IT team to develop a customized platform to match the scope of work, which proved to be especially important during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the team had to quickly and efficiently increase capacity to help ensure that critical data was being delivered to support time-sensitive patient care and health research.
The team is able to create new integrations between systems in a day, rather than a week, giving them more time to work on improving their data management capabilities to better serve UHN’s clinicians, researchers, and ultimately patients.
As a result of its work with Red Hat, University Health Network has been able to focus on its mission to transform lives and communities through excellence in care, discovery, and learning. Due to strict security requirements for patient information, UHN has maintained on-premises servers, but the increasing reliability and security of cloud computing has their IT department interested in Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, to create a hybrid cloud foundation that can offer them even greater flexibility. They are also considering future adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to further optimize and speed its work.
Atif Chaughtai, senior director of global healthcare business, Red Hat
“Data Interoperability is a key foundation for driving innovation in the healthcare industry. Interoperability has been a huge focus of government regulations in order to drive down the cost of healthcare and improve patient outcomes. Red Hat’s open source supported platform enables organizations such as University Health Network, to focus on delivering improved patient care and experiences.”
Leon Goonaratne, senior director, digital, University Health Network
“The systems that drive many aspects of our workflow, such as admissions, health records and research, don’t automatically interact with each other. With Red Hat Integration, we’ve decreased our integration management efforts and critical data can be delivered to support time-sensitive patient care and health research.”