2021 was an impressive year for the CST Cerner project at Providence.
After COVID-19 pushed the original implementation plans off course, the CST and PHC teams regrouped in the Fall of 2020 and began rolling out smaller and more frequent go-live cycles. This enabled us to bring the final long term care homes (St. Vincent’s: Brock Fahrni and Langara sites), as well as more than 60 outpatient clinics, onto the system in 2021.
“We are lucky to have some staff here at the East Vancouver Community Dialysis Unit that have experience with CST but for some of us, it is all brand new. I personally have enjoyed hands-on training and boot camp and found it to be very beneficial. It’s great to work with colleagues that have the experience from St. Paul’s Hospital, which enables us to bounce information back and forth and exchange CST knowledge.”
-Rihana Lau, Unit Coordinator and Peer Mentor for East Vancouver Community Dialysis Unit
On the COVID front, our organization’s pandemic response, outbreak management and access/flow teams have benefitted from the enhanced ability to track and share data from CST Cerner.
By May of this year, ten COVID-19 test collection centres in the Vancouver region were using CST to integrate with labs, eliminating manual order entry and resulting in quicker turnaround times. These collection centres were also able to provide expected wait times to potential patients via the Emergency Department Wait Times website.
The Clinical Informatics team supported numerous improvement and sustainment projects for areas already live on the system. These included the launch of an improved Diet Order Catalogue, Automated Appointment Reminders, Phlebotomy Collect (a real-time closed-loop specimen collection system that reduces the frequency of adverse events and unnecessary pokes), as well as the integration of province-wide lab results, along with many others.
Our accomplishments in 2021 would not have been possible without the knowledge and support of PHC Program leadership, peer mentors, PHC’s Implementation and Clinical Informatics teams, the CST project team as well as staff and medical staff of across the organization.
