Desmond Entwistle lay in a hospital bed, his temperature soaring, as life and death swirled around him.
He had been admitted to a Montreal hospital while undergoing painful treatment for acute leukemia when, one day in December of 2004, he was simply forgotten about for 18 hours.
When staff took his temperature and realized he had likely picked up an infection, they plunged a needle into him, according to his son. They failed to notice the MedicAlert bracelet clasped around his father's wrist, which said that he was allergic to penicillin. He went into severe toxic shock and died six days later.
"They pumped him full of penicillin and killed him," his son, Darren Entwistle, the chief executive officer of Telus Corp., T-T said in an interview.
Four years earlier, driven by a hard business case, Mr. Entwistle began steering the Vancouver-based telecommunications giant into a major bet that it can help fix the sort of problem that would later contribute to his father's death.
Canada's health records system, based largely on paper and bracelets, is "arcane," he says, and in bringing it into the 21st century there is the opportunity for both profit and social good.
One can see the early result of the Telus plan at work in the emergency room of The Ottawa Hospital.
On a late afternoon recently, veteran physician Adam Cwinn could be found brushing his fingers across the glass surface of an iPad to zoom in on a chest X-ray.
The hospital plans to order 3,000 iPads by the middle of next year. Behind this move is Telus, which is providing the wireless network and has aggregated the hospital's databases on Telus software.
As its rivals buy up media properties in multi-billion-dollar blockbuster acquisitions, Telus is quietly hoping that medical institutions across the country are ready to follow The Ottawa Hospital's lead and dive into a new era of advanced health care technology. That would mean a surge in profit from a division that has annual revenues of about $400-million.
The move, industry watchers say, has relatively little risk for such a potentially huge payoff: It puts Telus in the lead position ahead of the intense strain that baby boomers will inflict upon this country's already-struggling and outdated health care system, at precisely the time when advanced technology such as tablets can finally offer a viable solution. There are just two small problems: Doctors often resist change and the whole thing is dependent on the political will to implement electronic solutions at a time of tight budgets and electronic health scandals.
"This is going to be the challenge that defines our lifetime," Mr. Entwistle says. "We have a ton of antiquated technology out there."
Before he got his iPad, Dr. Cwinn said, he spent way too much time checking printed charts, darting from patients' bedsides to desk-bound PCs and walking around the hospital to see what his staff were up to and which beds were empty.
Staring down at the chest X-ray, he says, "You wouldn't make a diagnosis with this, but for interacting with patients, it's excellent." With a giant flat screen TV above a hub of computers, he can also keep better track of his department's physicians and instantly see the number of free beds available, even at the hospital's other campuses.
He can also access crucial information right at a patient's bedside. Turning to the iPad, he pushes on an "allergies" tab. A list pops up.
Mr. Entwistle, in a later interview, says, "I wish they had that sort of technology when my father was ill."
And this is just the sexy, high-tech veneer; the much more crucial changes are happening elsewhere, with the hospital's vast databases merging into one flow of information for the first time.
For many businesses, this type of technology isn't revolutionary. But hospitals are renowned for being reluctant to change. For that reason, Dale Potter, The Ottawa Hospital's chief information officer, was hired from the private sector two years ago to shift the large institution onto a new path.
