It’s hard to believe it’s already been a week since we launched Connect Care across Wave One.
We would like to thank the thousands of patients, staff, physicians and volunteers who helped welcome Connect Care to Alberta in the early hours of Sunday, November 3. We applaud the work of those at our Wave One sites including the hundreds of outpatient clinics and services across the Edmonton Zone, sites at the Walter C. Mackenzie Campus, the East Edmonton Health Centre, Pharmacy and Diagnostic Imaging sites in the Edmonton Zone, and Alberta Precision Laboratories in Edmonton and the North Zone, including the lab at the Cross Cancer Institute and DynaLIFE lab sites across Alberta.
We also recognize the team efforts of our partners in this launch – Covenant Health, DynaLIFE, Alberta Precision Laboratories, and the many post-secondary institutions who supported training for students. There were many individuals and teams from sites within Edmonton Zone and other zones in the province, who were not part of Wave One, but who supported as super users and in other roles. This help has been invaluable to the success of this launch. Epic, our technology partner, has also been an amazing support to our teams.
With a health system as complex and large as AHS is, we expected some challenges as we embark upon this provincial Connect Care journey. We anticipated there would many issues as we transition – some have been more urgent, while others are not. As issues arise we have a 24/7 command structure, super user teams and technical experts in place to address them and we are working to resolve them quickly.
Putting Connect Care fully in place will take time. Resolution times for issues will vary and we need to expect this. This is change on a massive scale and it won’t be seamless. We are committed to get to where we need to be over the weeks and months ahead. At the same time, we also recognize that overall, the launch has gone very well, especially considering the magnitude of this implementation. We have continued to provide high-quality patient care over this past week, and that is a tribute to AHS staff and physicians, who have worked so collaboratively to move forward.
We are incredibly proud of the collaboration and resilience our teams have demonstrated throughout the launch. We know this is a challenging time for our frontlines and support staff, and we are so inspired by you and your positivity. There is recognition that when Connect Care is fully in place, and teams are confident in using it, it will allow us to provide better patient care to Albertans.
Together, you have done amazing things this week. Thank you for all you are doing.
Sincerely,
Dr. Verna Yiu
AHS President & CEO
