Hailed as A fundamental gamechanger

WINNIPEG — A new electronic booking system is being hailed as a gamechanger that will cut down surgery wait times in Manitoba.

“You’re on the list, (the) clock starts ticking,” said Dr. Ed Buchel, the provincial specialty lead for surgery at Shared Health, at a technical media briefing Friday.

The surgical wait list information management system gives medical professionals the ability to prioritize patients. It was introduced to Winnipeg hospitals in February and is scheduled to be implemented across Manitoba over the next six months.

It standardizes the collection, prioritization and reporting of surgical wait lists and provides a day-to-day count of all cases on waiting lists. It can be filtered by procedure, priority, days on a wait list, and the surgeon on the case.

It’s estimated about 20,000 people are currently waiting for surgery.

Currently, wait times use retrospective data that only considers completed surgeries. The new system will show all patients who are waiting, including those who have waited the longest, so surgeons can focus on patients with long waits, said Buchel.

“It holds me accountable to actual real patients waiting on real lists in real time, not retrospective time, not manipulative time,” he told media on Friday.

The booking system, which was years in the making, will replace the piecemeal method of collecting patients on wait lists, he said.

“Most of the wait lists lived in shoeboxes, in filing cabinets (and the) best-case scenario, in somebody’s personal Excel spreadsheet,” he said.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara is expected to provide more information on the program in the coming weeks.

Buchel said in Winnipeg, more surgeries are currently being performed and the number of surgeries that are completed outside of the target wait times has increased simultaneously, because the new booking system has allowed surgeons to prioritize more patients who have been waiting for a long time.

All Manitoba surgeons will be required to use the system to book operating rooms, and the program will also provide transparency on how many patients are cared for by each surgeon. It allows primary care providers to suggest patients be moved to another surgeon who has fewer patients.

“I’m still doing my highest priority cases just the same as I was before, but if I have openings or blocks or percentages of time that are open, we target the ones that we now have visibility on,” Buchel said.

“So that we don’t forget anybody who might be six months out or a year out, or called and said, ‘Hey, I’m not available for a while,’ and we sort of put them on a different pile in our stack of papers, and they fall off the table … and then we forget about them for literally a year. That’s the reality. We didn’t have good transparency on all of the patients waiting in all of the sites. We do now (in Winnipeg).”

An online public dashboard will be available after the provincewide rollout, but the information to be included is still under consideration, Buchel said.

The data will show how tax money is used in health care and uncover gaps that need further funding.

“Our goal and our promise for the population is that we, first, really optimize the resources we have,” he said.

“More than half of all the funds in this government in our province go to health care, and a ton go to surgery. I have to optimize the stuff that I have, and then be able to very clearly say, this is a group of people that are waiting for surgery and I don’t have any resources for them.”

After the provincial rollout has been completed, the system will fundamentally change wait times for surgery in Manitoba, he said.

“Transparency is our friend here, because it allows us to communicate well with the payers and the patients and the deliverers of the care,” he said. “We know who’s waiting for what.”

» Winnipeg Free Press