The great news of our recent philanthropic gift from Bell Canada to our Foundation and its Telemedicine campaign is especially exciting for me. It validates fourteen years of work, often intensive, devoted to this fabulous method of delivering healthcare.
I can’t help but reminisce on the days in the mid-nineties when my buddy Dr. Ed Lemaire and I were conjuring up visions of delivering care through videoconferencing. But in those days we were working with 56K modems, on a web browser called Netscape (Explorer wasn’t even around then) and postage stamp size video on NetMeeting.
Clients loved it! And thankfully we had a couple of prosthetic and orthotic specialists who realized how important it was to the clients, and compromised their usual routines to accommodate this primitive technology.
During the fourteen years I’ve traveled across Canada and into the U.S. to share the stories of our growing list of small victories in Telehealth at the Royal. I’ve seen much evidence of its success in other provinces, well ahead of Ontario until recently. We’re now seeing more research that validates the effectiveness of telemedicine. Yet the toughest part of the job for me is the tortoise-pace of change, even though we slowly increase the number of clients seen each year. And even though we can boast about our latest accomplishment taking Telemedicine to our Canadian Astronaut aboard the Space Shuttle, I still wanted to do more.
What excites me the most about this gift is that it empowers us to really become innovative again! To think outside the box again! To listen to great ideas, and have the resources to act. It hasn’t felt like this since the days of our Health Canada Grant in 2002-2004.
I’m grateful to the Foundation and Bell for believing in the power of Telemedicine, and to my past champion friends like Dr. Ed Lemaire, Dr. Robbie Campbell, Dr. Andre Cote, Eddie Lloyd, Martin Manseau and many others who have believed in this for as long as I have.
As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Learning Management System: An Exciting Tool with a Terrible Name
The term Learning Management System (LMS) can seem cold and impersonal, however it is creating a buzz around our office, and hopefully among staff who have help us out over the past few months. We’ve received valuable input from over a dozen key education and training stakeholders around the ROHCG, helping us with vital decisions on purchasing the best vendor and product, and helping us shape the design and functionality of this upcoming software tool.
Let me try to explain this upcoming change in simple terms, focusing on what it will mean for staff and managers.
Remember your schooldays when you received your course outline and class schedule?
The Learning Management System will present each staff person will a list of their required courses. Some courses (or training if you prefer that term) will be mandatory at some point; others may be part of a development plan designed to grow a professional competency. And there are many who are required to participate in a minimum amount of continuous education activities to meet professional standard requirements.
Your Learning Management System account will provide you with that information and empower you to better manage your education and training requirements.
Managers have been telling me for years of their struggles monitoring and managing the education activities of their team members. The Learning Management System will enable them to review the activities of the full team at a glance, and to take a closer look at the accomplishments of any individual on their team.
And there are the numerous “bells and whistles” that powerfully enhance the Learning Management System. Things like online class registration, tools to assist trainers in planning their sessions, the generation of numerous reports, and much more.
As a champion supporter of this system, I believe this system will raise everyone to a new level of accountability for our professional growth and development activities. One of my favorite mantras from the world of Quality is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. We’ll finally be able to measure our activities, individually and collectively. That will make it dramatically easier to manage our knowledge growth and development.
As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.
Let me try to explain this upcoming change in simple terms, focusing on what it will mean for staff and managers.
Remember your schooldays when you received your course outline and class schedule?
The Learning Management System will present each staff person will a list of their required courses. Some courses (or training if you prefer that term) will be mandatory at some point; others may be part of a development plan designed to grow a professional competency. And there are many who are required to participate in a minimum amount of continuous education activities to meet professional standard requirements.
Your Learning Management System account will provide you with that information and empower you to better manage your education and training requirements.
Managers have been telling me for years of their struggles monitoring and managing the education activities of their team members. The Learning Management System will enable them to review the activities of the full team at a glance, and to take a closer look at the accomplishments of any individual on their team.
And there are the numerous “bells and whistles” that powerfully enhance the Learning Management System. Things like online class registration, tools to assist trainers in planning their sessions, the generation of numerous reports, and much more.
As a champion supporter of this system, I believe this system will raise everyone to a new level of accountability for our professional growth and development activities. One of my favorite mantras from the world of Quality is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. We’ll finally be able to measure our activities, individually and collectively. That will make it dramatically easier to manage our knowledge growth and development.
As per our blog policy - the opinions and comments in this article represent those of the author and should not be considered representative of the ROHCG.
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