Mohawk Applied Research Centre in Health Informatics

Located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Mohawk College is a respected educator in Information Technology and Health Sciences amongst other fields. The Mohawk Applied Research Centre (MARC) was launched In 2007 as a way for faculty, students and industry to discover new solutions to today's problems. The inaugural project of the centre is in Health Informatics (HI).

In the fall of 2007, MARC-HI launched a project to construct a reference implementation of Canada Health Infoway’s Electronic Health Records Solution (EHRS) blueprint using the existing Canadian eHealth messaging standards. The goal of the project is to build a real-world, working example of the technology and infrastructure necessary to interconnect health care providers. This project involves a broad array of public and private sector partners working on project elements of national and international scope.

The EHR project at MARC-HI is an applied research project; it is intended to learn what happens when the “rubber hits the road”. Although this is very different from academic research, the two can be quite complementary; promising academic research in eHealth can be prototyped and objectively evaluated in MARC-HI’s EHR lab.

The project is committed to undertake applied research. Applied research, in this context, means that – although the project may well extend the current state of the art – its mandate is to develop, in partnership with private and public sector partners, real world solutions to real world problems.

OHT Participation:

Dennis Giokas of Canada Health Infoway presented a overview of Mohawk's EHR project at the second OHT Board meeting.