Shared Health touts new system to ensure those who've waited longest for surgery aren't forgotten

Manitoba's health-care system has a new information management system that, for the first time, will track every surgery in the province and more accurately reflect wait times.

The Surgical Waitlist Information Management system — better known as SWIM — will help Shared Health target where patients are in their wait for a procedure, and prioritize people who have been waiting the longest for surgery where possible. 

"That is important so that we don't forget anybody who might be six months out or a year out or called and said, 'Hey, you know, I'm not available for a while,'" provincial surgical lead Dr. Ed Buchel said at a media briefing in Winnipeg on Friday.

There wasn't good transparency on all of the patients who were waiting for surgeries prior to the arrival of SWIM, Buchel said.

Every surgeon kept track of their own waitlists, some of which were stored in filing cabinets, he said.

"We sort of put them on a different pile in our stock of papers and they fall off the table and they get hidden, and then we forget about them for literally a year." 

Buchel said before SWIM, he would have no way of knowing what the waitlist was for a certain procedure and would have to spend time phoning around to get them. He said in some instances for hip, knee, cataract or cardiac procedures, there were Excel spreadsheets with "a little bit of a centralized intake."

"But we really were imprecise on our waitlist and they didn't exist for everyone else," he said.

"It's not the first time I've said this, but when I stood up with the [surgical wait times task force], those were best guesses because most of the wait lists lived in shoeboxes in filing cabinets … best case scenario, in somebody's personal Excel spreadsheet."

'We never had that ability before' 

The new goal is to prioritize people waiting the longest, which won't happen all the time because urgent surgeries still need to be done as quickly as possible, Buchel said.

"I'm still going to deliver my highest-priority cases, but given that I'm dealing with my most acute cases first, what's left on the table to deliver? Care should be focused, all other things equal, on the people that have been waiting the longest, Buchel said. 

"SWIM allows us to do that," he said. "We've never had that ability before."

Buchel also said every surgeon must put their waitlists into the centralized tracking system; otherwise, they can't book the operating room. 

He said with a centralized system, the total number of people on the waitlist will be longer than the health-care system has ever realized, but Buchel said progress is being made on that front.

He also hopes the decisions to centralize all waitlists also means nobody is forgotten anymore.

"I guarantee you surgery is increasing," Buchel said. "And I guarantee you the government knows what areas we need to prioritize. And I guarantee you we're going to be making advances." 

SWIM has already rolled out in Winnipeg and is expected to operational in the rest of Manitoba in six months, he said.