Patient-controlled data

Abstract

Quality has become a central focus in health systems, however the notion of quality as what happens within a single care encounter, or in a single setting, fails to reflect the patient’s experience of care in today’s complex systems. Effective communication between care providers, both within one care setting and between different settings, is a sine qua non of quality assurance. However, despite massive investments in information technology, communication breakdowns are common and costly in terms of quality of care. At the 2017 conference of the McGill University Health Centre’s Institute for Strategic Analysis and Innovation (MUHC-ISAI), Laurie Hendren, professor of computer science and breast cancer patient, presented the experiences of communication breakdown that encouraged her current work, with her colleagues Tarek Hijal and John Kildea, to develop a patient-centric solution to the challenge of assuring effective health data management.