About The Hospital for Sick Children
Affiliated with the University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) is Canada’s most research-intensive hospital and largest centre dedicated to the improvement of children’s health in the country. By staffing professionals from all disciplines within both health care and research, SickKids provides the best in complex and specialized care through creating scientific and clinical advancements, sharing knowledge and expertise, as well as championing the development of accessible, comprehensive and sustainable child health systems.
The Challenge
SickKids decommissioned an electronic medical chart application (CIMS) which ran in the Neonatal, Pediatric and Cardiac Intensive Care Units since 1999. The hospital required the migration of billions of records from CIMS to a new system allowing administrators and researchers to find, export and analyze this data. The new application likewise needed to centralize historical information from multiple ICUs in the form that would be easier to use by hospital staff. In addition to the migration effort, the hospital was seeking data scientists capable of implementing relevant data analytics and machine learning algorithms in an attempt to pull novel insights from the historical data that was otherwise out of reach from the institution’s researchers.