Professor Vedat Verter awarded CFI Grant
Professor Vedat Verter was awarded the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Leaders Opportunity Fund grant in the amount of $ 146,583 for his project titled “Real Time Location Systems: An Opportunity for Improving Operational Decisions in Acute Care.” With a matching cash contribution from the Quebec government as well as in-kind contributions from vendors, the total project budget amounts to $366,456.
Hospital administration involves difficult decisions concerning the trade-offs among the quality, accessibility and cost of care. This challenge is exacerbated by the congestion across the healthcare sector, the increasing costs of care and the growing prevalence of comorbidities in the patient population. Although significant strides have been made concerning the strategic and tactical decision-making process in hospitals,there is a gap in the academic literature on the optimization of day-to-day operational decisions. An example of such a decision in a hospital ward is “how can we optimize the bed turnover so as to increase bed utilization?” It is not possible to tackle the question above without detailed patient-level process data, which is not captured in a significant majority of Canadian hospitals. Indeed, without a solid understanding of the dynamic and complex nature of acute care processes, even the seemingly simple question of “what is the ACTUAL cost of patient X to the hospital?” constitutes a major challenge.
The equipment grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation will be used for the installation of real time location systems at the Surgical Services Department of the Montreal Jewish General Hospital. The live data feed from the department will be cleaned of patient identification at the satellite lab that will be established at the hospital and fed into the main research laboratory that will be built on the 5th floor of the Bronfman Building.
Read more about it here: Canada Foundation for Innovation, June 5, 2013