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.