Help Wanted: London hospital on hiring spree amid digital records push

Southwestern Ontario’s largest hospital is on a hiring spree, seeking more than 90 workers as it ramps up its push to digitize patient records.

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Sixty-eight of the positions at London Health Sciences Center are open immediately, the hospital announced Thursday. Most of the positions are permanent full-time roles with remote and hybrid work options.

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Though there is a significant information technology component to this project and many positions require that kind of knowledge, there are many posts where clinical experience is an asset.

“We are looking for a variety of health-care workers including members of a health discipline or technologists; people who have both an educational background in clinical care delivery and real-life experience, ideally working in a hospital environment,” the hospital’s digital health executive Andrew Mes said in a statement.

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“We will train them on the technology.”

The jobs include paid vacation, a pension plan and benefits, LHSC officials said. Non-clinical roles include entry-level jobs, such as support analysts, and senior positions include solutions architects. There are several project management roles available as well, LHSC officials said.

Health records now are a mix of digital and paper files. LHSC and 11 regional hospitals are now entering the next phase of a multi-year project to get these paper records digitized. Doing so will ensure real-time information flow between the hospitals, since a paper file at LHSC’s Victoria Hospital is of limited use to a care team in Woodstock, and vice versa.

The project, called OneChart, will improve patient safety, information quality and communication between care teams at LHSC and among area hospitals, LHSC officials said. Digital transformation is a core part of the hospital’s 2023-27 strategic plan.

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After OneChart is fully up and running, a patient transferred from LHSC to Woodstock Hospital, for example, would have their digital health information arrive before they do.

“We are changing how health care is delivered across a huge portion of Southwestern Ontario and improving quality for patients and that is exciting,” Mes said. “We are building a system that supports excellence in clinical care, and if you are passionate about that, these are opportunities you should explore.”

The London Health Sciences Center workforce is made up of roughly 15,000 staff, physicians, students and volunteers.

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