THE CHALLENGE:

Develop a web application that automates eHealth Saskatchewan’s Registries and Vital Statistic Office (VSO) that connects and enables physicians, nurse practitioners, coroners, and funeral directors to enter death certifications easily and transmits private data securely to the VSO for registration.

THE OUTCOME:

Delivered a fully featured Electronic Death Registration and Notification 7/24 website that is accessible in medical facilities, LTCs, city and rural roads, and funeral homes across the province.

CLIENT OVERVIEW:

eHealth Saskatchewan is a Treasury Board Crown Corporation. The organization also plays an important role in providing IT services to patients, health care providers, the Ministry of Health and the Saskatchewan Health Authority. eHealth is taking a provincially managed, locally delivered approach in setting up a single provincial IT service that supports the delivery of health care throughout the province.

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BUSINESS CASE:

ARC is a proven consulting and contracting partner helping Saskatchewan ministries by provided a breadth of IT staff for projects, operations, investigations, and specialty work. The federal and provincial governments were collaborating to gather country-wide death data quicker by removing paper forms for new provincial web sites to securely accelerate the capture, sharing, and registrations of death. In doing so, the province can leverage their current provincial health information to help professional certifiers verify the decedents identification more accurately and continually improve the province’s health data.

INTENDED OUTCOMES:

• Improve the timeliness of the province’s death registrations by than 50%.

• Substantially replace the existing paper-based process and leverage existing IT system within the VSO to leverage existing health data repositories.

• Improve the timeliness and accuracy of the data received by the VSO to verify and complete the registrations of death.

• Improve record matching ability for federal partners.

SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES:

• Enabled and transformed professional certifiers’ mindset to move from paper certifications and accept and embrace the faster online capturing and sharing death data.

• Engaging, acknowledging, and converting the breadth of professional certifiers, teams, leaders, and associations, etc. across the province to improve their work process and their colleagues. This new framework would need to be free, reduce that work each profession’s workplace, will be accessible to all professions online 24/7.

• Proactive Communications Management with professions to stay engaged and active during the design, build, test phases and accessible for end user validation.

• VSO needed to track delayed or forgotten draft certifications to ensure no death data is incomplete.

• Improve the decedent validation by securely leveraging the provincial health data so Physicians, Coroners, and/or Funeral Directors can select (or override) the identity of the decedent.

BUSINESS SOLUTION:

OUTLINE OF SOLUTION:

• Engage with professionals across the province to listen and design a solution that they would like to use and help them do their day-to-day work more efficiently.

• Leverage, expand, and simplify the VSO team’s current technology so professional certifiers can provide their data quickly, verify the correct decedent, and securely send it to the Vital Statics Office for registration and inform the federal government.

SIGNIFICANT DELIVERABLES:

• Delivered the Electron Death Registration and Notification (EDRN) web application for provincewide use

• The province’s professionals: Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, Coroners, and Funeral Directors are able search, certify, and securely/privately transmit their certifications to other certifiers and ultimately send to the VSO for registration and transmission to Service Canada.

• ARC was able to drive the assessment of four (4) provinces’ and leverage that knowledge to hone the solution for Saskatchewan. ARC provided a Change Management approach able to reach-out to all the professions and professional leaders to recruit, engage, discuss, and establish people-focused website interface and interactions with other professionals.

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