TransForm's e-VOLVE team wins CIO Awards Canada for 2022
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We are thrilled to announce that TransForm’s e-VOLVE team has been recognized as the winner of the CIO Awards Canada for 2022 by International Data Corporation (IDC) and CIO. The e-VOLVE team, in partnership with our member hospitals – Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, Erie Shores HealthCare, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare and Windsor Regional Hospital, spearheaded the largest digital transformation project of its kind for the Erie St. Clair region, during the COVID-19 pandemic. TransForm led the team across the four hospitals, representing six sites and over 1000 beds, to implement the Cerner Millennium hospital information system (HIS).
What is e-VOLVE all about?
The e-VOLVE project focuses on building a shared, longitudinal patient record that is easily utilized and shared across the Erie St. Clair region, with the goal of maximizing efficiency for various stakeholders including patients, staff and providers. Through the implementation of this award-winning project, TransForm contributed to a 20% improved patient satisfaction rate while enabling four member hospitals to achieve level 6 of 7 on the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model.
Celebrating a Milestone
The recognition of e-VOLVE marks a very special milestone for TransForm as striving for excellence is part of the organization’s DNA and how it does business.
From inception to implementation, the e-VOLVE team consistently adopted an above-and-beyond approach and was able to successfully execute this project during the pandemic. Today, TransForm is incredibly proud that the team’s hard work and dedication is being recognized.
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It's Cyber Security Awareness Month! |
In honour of Cyber Security Awareness Month, TransForm's Information Systems and Security team is sharing tips to help you protect your information and computers.
Passwords
How to create a great password?
- Use any of the following: Uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters.
- Ensure that the password is longer than 8 characters for a good password and 10 or more characters for a secure password.
- Opt for complex, long passwords instead of pet names or personal information that can be easily guessed by cyber attackers.
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NEVER use the same password for multiple accounts and/or apps.
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NEVER share or write your password down!
- Utilize a password manager to securely safe and manage your passwords as well as generate strong new passwords.
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Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
What is MFA?
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is an authentication method that requires the user to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a resource such as PMI (Personal Medical Information), application, online account(s), or remote access for work. MFA is a core component of a strong identity and access management (IAM) policy. Rather than just asking for a username and password, MFA requires one or more additional verification factors, which decreases the likelihood of successful cyber-attack.
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The three main types of Multi Factor Authentication methods:
- Things you know aka passwords or pins.
- Things you have aka badges or smartphones.
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Things you are aka fingerprints or voice recognition.
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What does an enforced MFA strategy tackle?
Location-based MFA usually looks at the user's IP address and often their geolocation. This information can be used to simply block a user's access if their location information does not match what is specified on a whitelist or it might be used as an additional form of authentication in addition to other factors such as a password or OTP to confirm the user's identity.
Cyber criminals spend their lives trying to steal your information and an effective and enforced MFA strategy is your first line of defense against them. An effective data security plan will save your organization time and money in the future.
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Phishing
Statistically, how common is phishing?
Phishing is among the most frequent forms of cybercrime, but despite how much we think we know about these scams, they still catch us out all too often!
- According to Proofpoint's 2022 State of the Phish Report, 83% of organizations fell victim to a phishing attack in the past year.
- Verizon's 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 25% of all data breaches involve phishing.
These figures help explain why phishing is considered to be among the biggest cyber security risks that organizations face. With a single email, cyber attackers can steal our PMI (Personal Medical Information), personal information or infect our devices with malware (Ransomware).
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How to recognize phishing emails?
- Demanding urgent action, for example: click now to update your account!
- Emails with bad 'grahamer' and 'bader' spelling mistakes...
- Emails from unfamiliar people.
- Inconsistencies in email addresses, links and domain names.
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Suspicious attachments, which you should never open!
- Emails requesting login credentials, payment information or any sensitive data.
- Too good to be true emails aka the typical "you won x amount of dollars, click to redeem!"
Working from Home: how to protect yourself from phishing?
When you're working from home, you can't stop by a colleague's desk to verify that they sent you a request or authorized a transaction. But that's all the more reason to stay vigilant and verify.
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Be skeptical - don't blindly trust a person on the phone, or the sender of an email. Verify that people are who they claim to be, whether in person or via email or phone.
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Think whether you're feeling pressured - scammers want you to act without thinking so they often try to create a sense of urgency by designing fraudulent emails or messages to entice, trick or scare you into clicking on malicious links or providing confidential information.
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Be cautious with calls - scammers often use phone calls to try to obtain confidential information and might impersonate a colleague or pretend to be calling from a trusted vendor or contractor.
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TransForm's IT Department: Serving our Member Hospitals and the Health Care Industry
Technology plays an incredible role in creating more efficient and far-reaching solutions in the health care industry, with both hardware and software. There are times, however, we and our member hospital staff need some guidance in navigating the new technology or troubleshooting when problems arise. Who do you call? TransForm’s Senior Manager, IAR and IS Account Manager Cynthia Lane took the time, recently, to answer that question for us.
Q: What is the official name of your department and why does TransForm have this department?
A: The TransForm Tech Support team is the official name of the team. We provide onsite technical support for hardware and applications as well as after hours and remote support. We are responsible for endpoint devices or anything that a customer touches – be that a computer, printer, phone or other peripheral. We are often known as the ‘face’ of TransForm IT as we are onsite at the member hospitals and we create in person support relationships with our customers.
Q: How many people work in the department?
A: There are 19 full time staff across the five hospitals. On occasion, the team includes high school co-op placements.
Q: Can you describe a typical day in the life of your department?
A: The majority of our team’s work comes in the form of a customer created ticket. Duties include maintaining and repairing a fleet of over 6,500 computers, 1,000+ printers and over 12,000 peripheral devices. This includes updating and installing software and operating systems, creating and granting access to file shares, Citrix applications and creating user accounts in the active directory.
Q: How does the work of the department impact our health system?
A: Our team supports the devices that front line hospital staff use to do their jobs every day. With the Cerner solution in place, it is more important than ever that physicians and nurses have access to properly maintained and working hardware. This could be the scanner that reads the patients’ armbands or the label printer that prints the lab specimen label. This support extends beyond the physical device to the systems as well; Imprivata Tap N Go digital identity solution, System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) for devices and applications, 7/24 Downtime Viewer, Encryption, Windows updates, and security tools to name a few.
Q: Are there any challenges?
A: One of the greatest challenges we face is keeping up with the workload. The tech support team closed 28,626 tickets and 13,147 tasks in the last year. In addition, the tech support team engages on new initiatives and projects that support our endpoint devices (eg. PCs) from a security and management perspective including endpoint encryption, deployment of security tools, Imprivata Tap N Go and the 7/24 Downtime Viewer to name a few.
Q: What are some exciting initiatives or steps for enhancement the department is considering or currently implementing?
A: Our team is focusing more on endpoint device management with tools and strategies to better support the fleet of computers and other technology equipment that frontline hospital staff use on an every day basis.
Q: What can TransForm and our member hospital staff do to help the work in the department be more efficient, or is there anything the department wants staff to be aware of in order to help make the job of the team easier?
A: The best way to request services is through submission of a ticket on the TransForm Support Portal application in Citrix at http://cherwellapp.esclhin.on.ca/CherwellPortal/support and include as much information as possible. This allows us to prioritize and manage our workload for the day which is a great help.
Q: What do you love about your job?
A: We love helping our customers get their issues resolved and providing an excellent customer experience. For example, in 2017, TransForm staff at Bluewater Health in Sarnia, were able to give a dying grandmother her final wish to see her grandchild. Thanks to the compassion of nursing staff and the expertise of IT staff, a 3-D ultrasound live image was streamed to the grandmother’s hospital room. The family was very grateful staff was able to make that happen. More recently, the tech support team also contributed greatly to frontline health care through their support for the setup and operations of the Covid-19 field hospitals, Covid assessment centres and vaccination sites within tight timeframes.
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Meet: Jayson Ilisevic, Clinical Systems, Junior Business Analyst
With so much on the go, including a recent marriage to the love of his life, Meagan, it is incredible that Jayson Ilisevic, TransForm Junior Business Analyst, Clinical Systems, can keep all the balls he juggles in the air. We had a chance to chat with Jayson when he returned from his honeymoon to find out the secret of keeping his work and home life in balance.
Jayson started at TransForm in March, 2018 in Supply Chain when the team launched a medical supply distribution program to homecare providers in the region. He is also a part-time instructor at St. Clair College, where he has been teaching medical communication and clinical documentation skills for OTA/PTA’s and other aspiring medical professionals for the past six years. Creating the course - Communication and Documentation Skills for the OTA/PTA – he described as a fun challenge and is the first core-curriculum, Ontario college-level course that he has created from the ground up.
Prior to TransForm, Jayson was a lead OTA/PTA at an OHIP-funded physiotherapy practice in Chatham for five years.
As the TransForm regional training coordinator, Jayson spends the bulk of his time investigating tickets and troubleshooting issues to provide solutions/insight as it relates to:
- Coordinating end user training at member hospitals
- Communicating changes to member hospitals that the upgrade and build team(s) have made that may affect previous workflows
- Maintaining the Cerner eCoach tool and ensuring all job aids within it are relevant and up-to-date for end users in our region
- Collaborating with various AID portfolio teammates on a handful of project teams/working groups such as LEARN/TRAIN upgrade team, Surgical Wait Times team, Data Quality Systems team, Dragon working group and the Cherwell working group.
He also co-chairs the Regional Training Team and maintains a list of discussion points for monthly regional meetings with member hospitals.
Taking on all those tasks has its challenges, but Jayson said, most recently, coordinating and working on the LEARN/TRAIN domain upgrade has been one of the most difficult challenges he has faced while at TransForm in terms of the hurdles the team had to overcome in a short period of time.
“There are so many moving pieces to the puzzle and the team accumulated days-worth of time spent in Excel books and in Cerner programs to simulate a live patient environment for training purposes. I am thrilled to share that we have now produced the nicest LEARN/TRAIN domains of Cerner that this region has seen to date (I may be biased!). I am so proud of what the upgrade team and everyone involved has accomplished, thank you again for your hard work!” he noted.
One aspect Jayson shared that he likes most about his job is that although he doesn’t deal directly with patients anymore, he can still make a difference in our region’s healthcare system with his role. He also really enjoys working with his colleagues.
“We have a strong team of smart individuals who are great at supporting and motivating each other,” he added.
What is his secret to keeping up with all his daily tasks? Jayson shared the strategy he has been using for the last year that has helped significantly when trying to balance multiple project team tasks and supporting member hospitals along with his own day-to-day tasks.
“I use OneNote daily and weekly to-do lists while managing order-of-priority items to keep me on track. I get a lot of communication coming in from different avenues and sometimes it is a challenge to keep requests in one place. OneNote and Cherwell allow me to keep items in check,” Jayson explained.
Outside of work, to add some fun and relaxation to his busy schedule, Jayson loves volunteering, golfing, fishing, hunting and anything to do with the outdoors. He also has a passion for music and playing musical instruments, and sits on the board of the Kiwanis Club of Chatham-Kent. His greatest love, however, is his wife, Meagan who he married on August 20th on what he said was an amazing day. Congratulations Jayson and Meagan and best wishes for a happy and healthy future together!
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Here's What Our
Customers Are Saying
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Here's What Our
Customers Are Saying
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"Great service, always helping out with my needs."
"Prompt service with no complicated steps."
"Always professional and timely with communications!"
"Always quick to respond to my service needs."
"Good customer service and quick response."
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Sometimes, employees go the extra mile and deliver a wow!
To help recognize these instances, TransForm introduced the Going the Extra Mile recognition program for TransForm employees.
Hospital members, TransForm employees and other customers can submit an online nomination based on the criteria below to recognize employees who have “gone the extra mile” in providing services.
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TRANSFORM www.transformsso.ca
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