Backgrounder

About Trillium’s Innovative Order Sets Project

Overview & Background
Trillium Health Centre is one of Canada’s leading and largest community hospitals, with expanding regional tertiary care programs in cardiac care, stroke, orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, and sexual assault and domestic violence services. Serving over one million residents in Peel and West Toronto and from other communities across the province, Trillium has redefined the boundaries of community health care delivery and is a recognized leader in health innovation.

Trillium uses a paper based order system and is planning migration to an electronic based system in 2007. A project to implement standardized evidence based order sets across Trillium was started over two years ago.

The project has created or updated more than 200 order sets that are accessible in a web enabled database.

Order Sets: A Decision Support Tool
An order set is a group of orders with a common functional purpose that is used directly by clinicians to create orders for specific patients. Order sets arrange medical information in a way that helps clinicians select the best medical treatments for their patients.

Key Benefits
The Order Set Project identified five key benefit areas of Order Set use:

• Improved Workflow
• Improved Quality
• Improved Patient Safety
• Critical Enabler for Computerized Physician Order Entry
• Enhanced Accuracy of Health Records Coding

The Order Set Advantage
Order Sets are integrated into clinical workflow working with clinicians as they create orders for patients. Order sets provide clinicians with the knowledge they need (evidence based best practices), at the time they need it (when they are writing orders) where they need it (contained in the medium they are using to create the orders) in a format designed to facilitate application to individual patients.

Trillium’s Order Set Innovation
The change in the order set process began by moving away from traditional hospital approval structures and establishing an Order Set Committee (OSC). The OSC, working with clinical teams from across the health centre, was responsible for overseeing the development, approval and implementation of order sets. This process was designed to be responsive to the needs of order set improvement by minimizing the time to approve and modify order sets while improving order set quality. The OSC is an interdisciplinary committee, including nursing, pharmacy, laboratory, Allied Health, Physicians, Health Records.

About Trillium Health Centre
Trillium Health Centre is one of Canada's largest community hospitals with regional tertiary care programs in cardiac, stroke, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, and sexual assault and domestic violence services. Housing a model ambulatory care centre and the largest free-standing day surgery centre in North America, Trillium serves over one million residents in Peel and West Toronto and from other communities across Ontario. With the continued support of the Trillium Health Centre Foundation, the hospital's fundraising arm, the two-site facility is attracting international attention for its innovative approach to providing health care services and has received numerous national awards for quality and innovation. For more information, go to www.trilliumhealthcentre.org.

Media Contacts

For all media enquiries, please call Public Relations at 905-848-7580 ext. 3832.