There is no shortage of ideas buzzing in Dr. Rob Williams’ brain. The clinical director of the Northern Ontario Remote Telecommunications Health (NORTH) Network is always looking for ways to better deliver tele-health services into every nook and cranny of Northern Ontario.
He has a funding proposal in the works to outfit public health units and the Community Care Access Centres, the brokers for home-care services, in their coverage area with videoconferencing capabilities.
He’s developing a home-care chronic disease management project providing distant electronic surveillance for sickly shut-ins.
The NORTH Network’s future potential now is considered a North American leader in telehealth delivery.
“It’s just exploding,” Williams says.
As co-founder of the Timmins-based NORTH Network, Williams is on the road more than ever, assisting in new site startups or travelling the continent giving presentations on the success of the network.
Rolled out in 1998 with four sites in Timmins, Cochrane, Kirkland Lake and Toronto, the network today comprises 180 hospitals, nursing stations and First Nations communities in Northern Ontario and has spread to the Highway 11 communities of central Ontario and into some underserviced towns in southwestern Ontario.
Now Williams and his staff are preparing to move into a fifth phase of expansion, from the acute care hospital market into more community-based health-care applications, part of their integrative strategy to link hospitals with long-term care and home-care providers.
As chief of staff at the Timmins and District Hospital in the pre-Internet days of the 1980s and early 1990s, Even then, Williams harboured a fascination with using information technology in health care management.
His networking sessions with other like-minded physicians led to a partnership with Dr. Ed Brown of Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. Brown first floated the idea of using videoconferencing to link Northern doctors with specialists in the south for consultations and continuing education. He recruited Williams to shepherd the project through its early development stages.
Williams built a pilot program fromscratch. He raised the $2.2 million in start-up funding from government and private sources, set up the phone line infrastructure and adapted the technology — x-ray digitizers, analog stethoscopes, document scanners, faxes — and plugged them all into a videoconferencing platform.
“We did a tremendous amount of work with the vendors to design the equipment and make it in a user-friendly way for health-care people and to train them.”
A big “leap forward” for the network was the changeover from phone lines to broadband and an internet protocol (IP) network.
“It delivered huge capacity in an affordable way,” says Williams. A regular month sees 1,200 doctor-patient consults and 250 educational and administrative link-ups over the network.
