A year after Epic kick-started UHN's clinical transformation, Project Agile is about to do the same for the business end of the network.
Enabled by Digital, and powered by our Finance, Procurement & Supply Chain teams, the initiative will touch every corner of UHN. It will transform how the organization manages its finances and supports patient care by utilizing our data better, and modernizing our systems so we get the best possible outcome of every dollar spent.
In a fiscally constrained publicly supported health care environment, this is critical to ensuring we have what we need to best serve our patients, and support research and education.
"This kind of technological investment is all about creating the strongest foundation for growth and innovation, and quite frankly, the time is right," says Darlene Dasent, Executive Vice president and Chief Financial Officer, UHN.
"Our existing software platform required a mandatory update and we decided to transition our data to a UHN instance, allowing us to fully realize the benefits of a modern digital program."
Additionally, working with a new supplier, Cardinal Health Canada, will allow UHN to have a global partner in procurement and supply chain as we develop new insights at each stage of the process – everything from sourcing to purchasing, receiving and paying our vendors.
"What it means to our clinicians and researchers, is they're going to have UHN people helping them ensure they have the goods and services they need to deliver the care and perform their research," says Lili Chen, the Project Director of the Supply Chain Transformation at Project Agile. “And better tools to help them optimize their time and dollars."
This also impacts UHN's Central Stores, where the team will benefit from a new cart and scanner program, that will ensure more accuracy in terms of supplies, and a more efficient system for ordering and receiving products from our supplier.
"The teams will no longer have to come down to the basement to download orders and send them to the distribution centre," says Michael King, Director of Materials Management at UHN. "The new scanners increase efficiency, reduce time, and we gain productivity."
Project Agile will support the organization in being nimble in its sourcing of products and services, and allow our finance colleagues to spend more time being strategic, and less time with manual processes.
"It's going to give us an understanding of our data, our spend, and allow us to be extremely strategic as we move forward and do things in an automated way," says Hugh Amiel, the Director of Procurement at UHN and the co-business sponsor for Project Agile.
Ultimately, the benefits of Project Agile will be in how UHN serves patients. Traditionally, procurement in health care systems has been mostly focused on dollars and cents.
However, with Project Agile, a value-based procurement structure is being implemented. UHN will have full access to, and ability to act on what our data tells us.
"Having this type of structure is vital, because we're now focusing on what is most important, the patient, rather than focusing on the dollars," says Dr. Fayez Quereshy, Clinical Vice President, and surgical oncologist at UHN.
