1. Describe the characteristics of useful information to the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. (i.e., When is information useful to VCH?)

2. Discuss the costs of information as they relate to the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

3. How can increasing the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority’s access to information increase their knowledge and expertise?

The Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) Authority serves 25 percent of British Columbia’s population; more than 1 million people look to VCH for acute care, primary care, home and community care, and mental and public health services. Vancouver Coastal Health has an annual budget of more than $3.4 billion, and a staff of more than 20,000 including 2,100 physicians, and 5,000 volunteers. Every year VCH provides more than 2.8 million patient days of care, and sees more than 356,000 people in emergency departments (that’s one person every two minutes). Vancouver Coastal sees 845,000 patient visits to their clinics and provides more than 89,000 same-day surgical visits per year.

The hospital’s databases contain information on more than 4 million patients whose data are spread across various Health Authority databases. They use 385 servers and 20 storage systems that are often incapable of sharing data or “talking to each other.” Because these servers often have trouble communicating with each other, doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel often have trouble accessing the information they need in a timely fashion. When a patient from the Sunshine Coast gets an MRI at the downtown Vancouver General Hospital, she might find her doctor has not received the scan results by the time of her next appointment. Incidents like these are unfortunately the norm and an information system so large and spread out makes information expensive to store and retrieve. Each MRI, CAT scan, ECG, EEG, or other diagnostic procedure is stored on its own server, with its own operating system, with its own language peculiarities.