While Ontario’s COVID-19 vaccination rates are climbing, the situation in hospitals is still severe. Healthcare providers from across the country are being deployed to Ontario ICUs and the province recently called on the Red Cross for help. 

While the extra help is welcome and needed, how do we equip outside workers — experts in other fields like pediatrics or cardiology — to best care for COVID-19 patients? It’s a vital aspect of the pandemic response that shouldn’t be overlooked. 

We’re working behind the scenes to keep frontline workers up-to-date with the latest best practices. Think Research’s research and development team is urgently deploying digital COVID-19 tools across hospital systems to help deliver care in a standardized way.

In practice, this means frontline workers assessing COVID-19 patients have the latest evidence-based information on the disease at their fingertips. Our COVID-19 order sets act like digital checklists, guiding clinicians through a set of questions and treatment options based on a patient’s condition. Our decision support tools bring the world’s best medical knowledge on the disease into local hospital systems so that everyone is on the same page when it comes to care. This is crucial.

Research shows that standardized care in acute settings improves patient outcomes. When clinicians are stretched thin and ICUs are at capacity, standardization also reduces errors and cuts health spending waste. Put simply, it improves healthcare for everyone. 

Because our understanding of COVID-19 and how to treat it is constantly evolving, Think’s team of clinicians regularly update our cloud-based tools based on emerging evidence. In the past year, our tools have been updated 17 times. We’ve also made them available free of charge to our partners. This ensures that healthcare providers, whether they’ve cared for COVID-19 patients for the past year or have been recently deployed to an acute COVID-19 care setting, are all up to speed on the best practices. 

Canada is still dealing with high COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations. We know more now than we did at the start of the pandemic about fighting this devastating disease, but a unified response is still needed. Ensuring every single frontline worker is armed with the best tools to care for Canadians is vital to pushing through this crisis. 

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