North America's First Fully Digital Hospital Adopts PetalMD

Canada’s first fully digital hospital opened its doors last October in Toronto, Ontario. Humber River Hospital is one of Canada’s largest regional acute care hospitals and is now using cutting edge technologies to offer patients better care through enhanced communication, instant access to information and automation of activities across the hospital.

The new state-of-the-art facility automates routine processes to enhance patient experience and physician workflows. For example, robots deliver non-narcotic drugs and other supplies, diagnostic images such as MRI scans are charted immediately, and patients can check in on self-serve kiosks that automate patient records and notify relevant care teams when a patient has arrived.

PetalMD is proud to be one of the few companies to help the hospital run completely paper-free. Humber River has selected the PetalMD hospital on-call list dashboard to consolidate all department schedules on one platform and centralize access to on-call physicians.

“PetalMD is the best of the best. We looked at all of them and PetalMD is far beyond. Physicians are expecting extreme ease of use. We are very happy with our choice and are looking forward to getting started,” says Mary Latter, Director of Medical Affairs at Humber River Hospital.

With the mission to go completely paperless, the hospital was looking for software that could streamline its communications. What was particularly important was for the on-call list to be accurate and complete and to make sure every shift was covered. They were looking for an easy solution to update and for the nurses to know who it is they were supposed to be contacting.

“I like that it’s online and accessible from anywhere, and I can access it from my mobile device.” says Mr. Nesrallah, Director of Nephrology.

The hospital is very happy with the dashboard integration into their workflow. Adoption was relatively easy and the people that weren’t computer literate were able to use PetalMD easily. Although it’s too early to measure the effect, the software was adopted across departments, and the staff are hopeful that the software will save them time.

One of the biggest impacts with PetalMD, according to Mary Latter, Director of Medical Affairs, is when there’s a shift exchange, the doctors have more control. For example, let’s say something has come up with Dr. Smith and he can’t do a shift. Now he can exchange his shift directly in the PetalMD app, with the changes reflected in real-time. Locating who’s on call, the doctors can make their own changes. From that perspective, it gives them more freedom and more control of their lives.