Montreal hospital partners with Israeli digital health company

The Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. (Supplied photo)

The Jewish General Hospital (JGH) and its affiliated regional health network have turned to an Israeli high-tech company to transform its information system.

The partnership with MDClone will enable CIUSSS West-Central Montreal to collaborate with health organizations worldwide to improve operations, enhance patient care and further academic research, according to an announcement.

CIUSSS West-Central Montreal is one of the largest health networks in Quebec , with 34 facilities under its umbrella, all of which now have access to MDClone’s sophisticated health care data analytics platform.

The Beersheba-based company claims that this “self-service” platform, known by the acronym ADAMS (Ask, Discover, Act, Measure, Share), reduces the time and resources normally required to retrieve data, thereby lowering costs to the health care system. Users do not need any special programming skills.

Last month, ADAMS was named the Best Healthcare Big Data Platform of the year by the MedTech Breakthrough Awards program that recognizes outstanding medical technology products and companies.

MDClone, which has been profiled in such news media as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Bloomberg, has developed the means to securely access, organize and share patient data instantly across an entire health care ecosystem, without mediators or compromising privacy.

Ottawa Hospital last year became the first health care organization in Canada to partner with MDClone, which was founded in 2016 and currently has clients in Israel and the United States.

The MDClone platform will be the core enabling technology of the “patient-centric” digital hub known as OROT, which the JGH and CIUSSS recently launched.

“Because of this partnership, we now have access to an extensive amount of clinical data, research and other important population health topics that will prove valuable to enhancing the care of our patients and of patients around the world,” stated CIUSSS president and CEO Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg.

“The ADAMS platform removes lengthy delays associated with traditional analytics, while safeguarding patient privacy. Researchers, clinicians and other authorized users can now explore data without assistance from IT analysts, reducing project timelines from many months to a few days.”

MDClone has developed “synthetic data” that mimics real-life information that does not identify who it comes from. The company’s CEO and founder, Ziv Ofek, explained that this replication “retains all of the statistical properties of original data but does not contain any individual patient information.”

Through this partnership, the JGH and CIUSSS, as well as Ottawa Hospital, have become founding members of MDClone’s Global Network, a research consortium of 14 health systems.

“We look forward to working on many ideas that impact the lives of patients at the JGH and across CIUSSS West-Central Montreal, and also to bringing those ideas to the global stage,” stated Ofek. “It is imperative that we continue to come together so that we can identify ways to improve patient care delivery and streamline operations, especially as we face ongoing challenges that come with a global health crisis.”

The CIUSSS comprises three specialized hospitals, five local community health care services centres, two rehabilitation centres, six long-term care sites (among them Maimonides Geriatric Centre and Jewish Eldercare Centre), two day centres and several affiliated research facilities. The total staff is more than 12,000, with more than 600 doctors.