A clinical research team from St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton has launched a new start-up, Llif Healthcare, and has raised more than $530,000 in investment funding to expand their healthcare solution designed to help physicians improve care delivery and the patient experience.
The move towards digital health systems across Canadian hospitals has created opportunities for software-based innovations leading to better healthcare delivery and outcomes for patients, quality improvement, and increased access to research studies.
In December 2017, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton launched its new digital health information system – called Dovetale – an implementation of the software designed by Epic used in many of the world’s leading hospitals. As an early adopter, St. Joe’s has been working with digital partners such as Llif Healthcare to develop innovative tools that leverage the analytic power of Epic.
Llif Healthcare is a Hamilton-based digital health technology start-up, cofounded by St. Joe’s emergency physician, Dr. Shawn Mondoux, as well as Dr. David Hamilton. The company is bringing its MD Dashboard to market and will soon launch in the Niagara Health System and Joseph Brant Hospital after successfully piloting the system in the Emergency Department at St. Joe’s.
Llif Healthcare’s MD Dashboard is a secure, cloud-based platform that displays practice data for physicians and entire departments. By anonymously analyzing practice data, clinicians and hospital administrators can extract the learnings they need to improve patient care, plan better clinical workflows, and provide clinicians with the practice analytics they seek.
“This was developed in-house with St. Joe’s Digital Solutions team and launched during COVID-19 – a great collaboration between St. Joe’s, Llif Healthcare, and McMaster University,” said Dr. Mondoux. Currently, the MD Dashboard at St. Joe’s Emergency Department reports on 12 metrics for clinical use. One of the most useful metrics collected by the platform is how often patients return to the Emergency Department within 72 hours of discharge.
“We are also looking to expand the service to other areas of the hospital with personalized metrics,” added Dr. Mondoux.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton has a well-established history of supporting innovation in healthcare delivery and optimization. By fostering collaborations between life science partners, The Research Institute of St. Joe’s Hamilton has led many locally developed innovations to make national and even global impacts. This includes the McMaster Molecular Medium, used for mass COVID-19 testing, and the 3 Wishes Project, which supports patients and families in the ICU.
“Getting objective, data-driven feedback about our practice is invaluable for the individual provider and by extension the care we provide to our patients,” said Dr. Greg Rutledge, Chief of Emergency Medicine at St. Joe’s. “As an individual physician, one can anonymously compare your utilization rates next to your peers, which will allow for better use of scarce resources and ensure that patients are getting the appropriate investigations.”
Owing to their successful implementation at St. Joe’s Hamilton and upcoming launch at Niagara Health, Llif Healthcare has recently received a $50,000 grant from the Ontario Bioscience Innovation Organization under its Early Adopter Health Network. This funding is supporting the platform’s latest expansion to Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, Ontario.
In addition, Llif Healthcare received nearly $400,000 from the McMaster Seed Fund to expand its operations by providing further opportunities for development, client acquisition, and strategic thinking as it welcomes new users from across the Canadian healthcare landscape.
“In most industries, employees receive valuable feedback on their work and physicians should be no different. Allowing the physician to be self-reflective about their practice with objective data will only serve to make them better physicians and enhance the care we provide at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton,” said Dr. Rutledge.
