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Project Leader

Department:

School of Optometry

Effective Date: January 2003
Grade: USG 12 Reports to: Administrative & Financial Officer

General Accountability

The Project Leader is accountable to the Administrative & Financial Officer of the School of Optometry and is responsible for a wide range of activities related to the School’s evaluation and possibly the implementation of electronic optometric medical records software

Nature and Scope

The School of Optometry provides a clinical facility for the education of Optometry undergraduates, graduate students and residents at the University of Waterloo. A comprehensive Optometric service is provided for the general public with approximately 25,000 patient visits per year. The School has begun a 9-year enrolment increase growing from the historical levels of 60 students per year to 90.  This enrolment increase will be supported by a significant building addition and current building renovation. The clinic is expected to be significantly renovated and some facilities relocated into the new addition.

 The School of Optometry clinic has acquired the optometric electronic records module, EOMR, of the current clinic information system, P&P Data Systems’ CIS product.  The Project Leader’s primary focus will be in providing guidance, advice and planning of all aspects of the evaluation, assessment and potentially pending the outcome of the assessment and evaluation, implementation of the EOMR module.  Additionally, during the EOMR evaluation and implementation opportunities for process improvement within the existing software would be identified and recommended by the incumbent.

 Project management as it relates to EOMR would include all aspects normally associated with 3rd party software evaluation and subsequent implementation. The incumbent will work closely with the Administrative & Financial Officer, Electronic Medical Records Evaluation team, computing support staff as well clinic staff and those faculty associated with the Clinic. 

 The consideration to use electronic optometric medical records in the School is a significant challenge for a number of reasons. Well established processes have been in place for many years supporting the paper record system with some 75,000 to 100,000 existing records.  As it is not feasible to convert these to electronic optometric medical records, implementation of EOMR will require the consideration and development of processes recognizing this constraint. As a teaching environment no 3rd party software specifically recognizes the additional issues that result from a teaching health care environment.  As such challenges exist in developing implementation strategies that adequately provide for the unique needs around student supervision in a health care setting.  Additionally, there are the challenges related to having some 50 plus faculty clinic supervisors using the system once implemented.  A further complication is that a number of the supervisors have very limited time in the clinic, as few as perhaps 20 or 30 days per year.  250 and eventually 360 students will have access to the system in both the teaching and patient care environments.

 As this a health care setting medical records are the subject of strict confidentially rules and regulations.  Given the diversity of the environment, size of the physical setting and numbers of those who would require varying levels of access to the EOMR confidentiality is a significant concern and must be addressed throughout the evaluation and implementation.

 The evaluation and assessment will likely require analysis of the current manual systems, the proposed OEMR product, process mapping, gap analysis, software functionality analysis, comparisons to other products, implementation planning and management along with other evaluation and implementation tasks.

Statistical Data

Specific Accountabilities

  Hardware Maintenance

Working Conditions