Harness information technology for health care, urges new school director

by Patty Pitts

In Dr. Patricia Coward’s ideal world, hospital patients would no longer take second place to time-consuming paperwork and record-keeping. Patient information would stream continuously through a wireless network to doctors’ and nurses’ hand-held computers, providing up-to-date vital information at a patient’s bedside and at every location a patient may transfer to within an increasingly complex health care system.

“Health informatics has huge potential to provide information at point of care so that health care providers don’t have to spend precious time thumbing through stacks of records and medical alerts,” says the new acting director of UVic’s school of health information science. “Using informatics improves the continuum of care so patients’ information travels with them. It helps people feel organized and safe.”
A former nurse, Coward is the school’s first director to come from a background of direct patient care. She stepped into the position on June 1 when Dr. Francis Lau was seconded to the Island Medical Program team.

Originally from Toronto, Coward trained at Toronto General Hospital, but after deciding she wanted to be a clinical nursing specialist in neo-natal infant care, she moved to Edmonton to take her master’s degree in nursing at the University of Alberta. That’s where she met her late husband, Jim Coward, and moved with him to Victoria when he became the co-op coordinator for health information sciences in 1986. Patricia was appointed assistant executive director of patient care at Victoria General Hospital.

But it wasn’t until she attended a conference in Ireland two years later that Coward first became intrigued by the emerging area of study that applied information technology to health care delivery.

“I picked up a conference brochure and I saw a workshop on the use of computers in nursing. I thought ‘Wow, I know nothing about that but it sure looks interesting,’” Coward remembers. “I met a woman called Patty Brennan from CASE Western Reserve University in a pub and three months later I was her grad student.”

Brennan remained Coward’s grad supervisor for the nine years it took her to earn her PhD in nursing systems from the Cleveland university, considered one of the top two graduate nursing schools in the U.S. (“There were no PhD programs in Canada then.”) Throughout that time, Coward continued advancing through the Capital Health Region (now the Vancouver Island Health Authority) hierarchy. Prior to coming to UVic she was vice-president of programs and acted as the authority’s CEO on three different occasions.

Despite her administrative duties at UVic, Coward will still teach two courses this year and lead the school’s 20th birthday celebrations. Two decades ago, the school was the first in Canada to offer the little-known and even lesser understood discipline. Now, awareness is building among health care administrators of the economic and health benefits of harnessing the power of information technology.
“It takes about a half-hour to complete a written patient report,” says Coward, considering how patient care could change with increased use of electronic data collection and retrieval. “That’s precious time that nurses could be spending with patients.”