 BY ADELLE LARMOUR
Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s Health Services Virtual Organization, is drawing national and international expertise to the region with its recently funded development project through Canada’s advanced network organization, CANARIE Inc.
Ottawa-based CANARIE serves a multitude of both public and private institutions to facilitate the development and use of its network as well as the advanced products, applications and services that run on it. It received $15 million from the Government of Canada under its Network-Enabled Platforms program, of which the Health Services Virtual Organization (HSVO) received slightly more than $2 million. HSVO is currently one of just a few cutting-edge nationally funded projects in this area and is anticipated to bring significant expertise, knowledge and innovative approaches to health care in Northern Ontario.
The project’s goal is the development of an integrated platform of remote, user-controlled online services for use within many areas of health care, supporting education, training and practice. Areas of interest include clinical skills, team preparedness, critical care, integrated basic sciences, evidence-based practice and surgery, and pathology skills and techniques.
This two-year project involves a variety of partner organizations: McGill University’s iDEAL Consulting, the National Research Council Institute for Information Technology in Fredericton, Industry Canada’s Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, and Stanford University and Innovations in Learning in California.
The project’s principal investigator, Dr. Rachel Ellaway, NOSM’s assistant dean of Education Informatics, will co-ordinate the project, working collaboratively with doctors, educators, technologists and network specialists to ensure the project’s outputs are useful and applicable in the real world. Ellaway’s background in the use of technology and medical education, particularly in simulators, virtual patients and virtual worlds, will dovetail with the wide range of experience and expertise of the 20-person team.
“It is about building integrated virtual services,” Ellaway explained, using a basic example like a remote webcam that provides a simple service connecting two people via a camera. “Imagine many different people taking control of that, panning and moving it around to view different things…at the same time.”
By connecting medical experts or students from locations hundreds or thousands of kilometres away working through devices such as virtual cameras, using remotely-controlled mannequins and distributed clinical evidence knowledge bases, they can allow many users to actively and collaboratively participate in experiences such as dissections, post mortems, resuscitation scenarios and other complex events.
“We are about establishing these end/remote services over user-controlled light paths (high-speed fiber optic networks) and put together in a single platform,” Ellaway said.
The benefits to Northern Ontario will be improved networking and increased knowledge and expertise.
“It is building capacity, knowledge and focus in that all these other people have their eyes on Northern Ontario,” Ellaway said. “We’re drawing national and international expertise into the region and we’re drawing that knowledge and applications down to get real activities on the ground both with medical students and medical practitioners.”
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