Canadian specialty hospital
125+ staff trained · 40+ forms digitized · 40 TB migrated
A high-volume specialty hospital ran clinical, administrative, and billing work on paper, PDFs, and a 25-year-old in-house billing tool. Patients across the country were assessed at pop-up clinics with no unified record, and intake errors produced thousands of dollars per day in downstream billing rework.
Operational complexity
The work crossed clinical, administrative, financial, and technical boundaries, had to keep the hospital fully operational throughout, and needed a single connected record from a patient's first online booking through surgery, discharge, billing, and long-term archival.
Solution delivered
A multi-year engagement covering Electronic Medical Records (EMR) selection, staff training, national online booking and intake, admission-to-discharge digitization, a custom Ministry-certified billing platform, rule-driven surgery booking, wristband label management, AI-assisted fax triage, and a large-scale migration of legacy data into a modern cloud environment.
How the engagement unfolded
1. EMR consulting and system selection
We started as advisors: assessing how the hospital actually worked day to day, mapping the clinical and administrative requirements, and helping leadership choose the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system that best fit those workflows rather than the other way around.
2. EMR training for 125+ staff
We led the rollout of the chosen EMR - starting with online booking webinars, then full EMR training across the hospital. More than 125 managers and targeted staff were trained directly, supported by prerecorded video and a train-the-trainer model so internal leads could keep onboarding new staff across departments and time zones long after go-live. The EMR was rolled out in phases, starting in the post-surgery ward so nurses could build confidence before wider expansion.
3. National online booking and intake for pop-up assessment clinics
The hospital runs temporary assessment clinics in other provinces, where physicians travel to see patients before surgery. We built a centralized online workflow so patients pick the nearest location, book their assessment online, complete a pre-assessment questionnaire, and mark affected areas on an interactive body diagram. Everything flows into one unified EMR record, so admissions, physicians, and follow-up visits work from the same source of truth country-wide.
4. 40+ clinical forms digitized end to end
We consulted on, redesigned, and implemented more than 40 electronic forms and workflows - intake and admission, consent, medication administration, nursing and intraoperative records, physician and surgeon assessments, discharge summaries, IV medication, medication inventory, diabetic and allergy management, food preferences, and more. The hospital moved from paper and PDF into a mostly paperless workflow from admission through discharge.
5. Custom Ministry-certified billing and claims platform
The hospital was still running on a 25-year-old in-house billing program that did not talk to the Ministry of Health's electronic submission and claims-management processes, creating thousands of dollars per day in avoidable labour. We gathered requirements with IT, billing, admin, and check-in leadership, then built and migrated to a Ministry-certified claims and accounting platform. It handles patient insurance capture, real-time health-card and referral validation, inpatient and outpatient claims, reciprocal billing, insured and uninsured services, multiple payer types and rates, receivables tracking, remittance and error-report ingestion, automatic splitting of line items into compliant claims, integration with the hospital's other accounting software, and single sign-on through the hospital's identity platform. Real-time validation at intake cut invalid health-card rejections by 90%.
6. Rule-driven surgery booking integrated with the EMR
Surgery booking involved many interacting rules - surgeon availability, procedure type, duration, checklists and prerequisites, timing gaps between procedures, and EMR appointment availability. We modelled those rules in a booking system that reads live availability, calculates the right slot and duration, suggests the next valid time, writes the appointment directly into the EMR, and confirms it back to staff.
7. Patient wristband and label management module
The chosen EMR did not support hospital wristband labels. We built a label-management application that launches directly as an EMR module so staff can print correctly formatted patient labels and wristbands without leaving the record.
8. AI-assisted incoming fax triage
Because the hospital receives a very high volume of clinical results by fax, we implemented an AI-enabled solution to triage, assign, label, and categorize incoming documents. Fax handling was reduced to one part-time person per day - capacity savings equivalent to two full roles.
9. 40 TB legacy data migration with hybrid offline retrieval
We inventoried, analyzed, and migrated approximately 40 TB of hospital data - millions of records spanning more than 20 years - into a modern cloud environment, with a hybrid architecture that preserved on-premises retrieval for offline continuity. Migration was staged in controlled batches with monitored progress, retries, and completeness checks, and the hospital stayed operational throughout the cutover.
10. Nightly cross-database reporting for management
We built an automated nightly process that consolidates data from the hospital's operational databases into one reporting environment, so management and intake teams get current aggregated insights without signing into multiple systems. Reporting now covers billing, patients seen, required follow-up, third-party extracts, internal analytics, clinical-trial datasets, and operational backups.
Adoption & controls
Delivered in sequenced phases beginning in lower-risk departments, using a train-the-trainer model with prerecorded content so internal leads could continue onboarding across departments and provinces after our team stepped back.
The network operated across more than 46 diagnostic clinics using spreadsheets, paper, and disconnected systems to track every referral, booking, patient visit, diagnostic result, report, and payment. Staff spent thousands of hours each month on repeated entry, cross-checking, and manual reconciliation. Scheduling alone required roughly 40 hours to build a single two-week cycle.
The physician printed and completed a form, then faxed it or manually uploaded a PDF to an online portal. Faxes could fail or encounter busy lines. Manual portal submission added roughly 10 minutes per case and took time away from patient care. On the insurer side, paper and PDF intake required scanning, OCR, manual review, and follow-up for missing information.
A First Nations / Aboriginal health network serving Indigenous communities in a major urban area was constrained by manual scheduling, limited virtual-care access, last-minute cancellations without reminders, and no secure way to send information electronically. Front-line providers, nurses, booking staff, and managers needed a unified patient-access platform that fit the realities of community-based care.