Collaborating to Save Lives and Improve Health Care: Hamilton Health Sciences Joins the Open Source Order Set Network

HAMILTON - Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) welcomes its newest partner in providing health care solutions, the Open Source Order Set (OSOS) Network.

Expanding upon its commitment to improve the quality of patient care, HHS will be integrating the OSOS network into its family of hospitals. This partnership will provide HHS with new technology that will be a key foundation for computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and will provide access to Order Sets created from around Ontario and across the country. By using Order Sets to help create orders for patients, physicians will have on-the-spot guidance about which tests, medications, and procedures are best for each patient. This instant access to a best practice and evidence-based tool improves patient outcomes by preventing unnecessary treatments and tests, saving valuable time and resources, and reducing errors while enhancing communication between health care team members.

Rob Lloyd, MD FRCPC, Associate Professor of Pediatric Critical Care and Medical Director, Clinical Informatics at HHS says, "This new HHS-OSOS partnership will provide great opportunities for improving patient care. Our order sets project is going to help us to improve on our record of bringing evidence and best practice to the bedside through external collaboration, internal consensus-building, and sharing with peers. We're excited about this new partnership."

HHS is also particularly excited that the OSOS Network enables sharing and collaboration between clinicians across Canadian health care organizations. "A collaborative approach is just common sense in Canadian health care," according to Chris O'Connor, MD, founder of OSOS. "This collaborative approach will empower organizations and enable them to learn from one another, ultimately providing better care to our patents."