What is Care Connector?

Care Connector is a clinical communication and collaboration platform developed at Trillium Health Partners (THP) to support interprofessional and patient-centred care. The goal is to allow physicians, nurses, and allied health staff to work in teams and provide more effective and efficient care enabled through improved communication.

My Journey with the Care Connector Team

I started at Care Connector as a co-op student hired to test UI components and then redesign front-end components.

However, leading up to my first day I was nervous about working in a hospital. I am quite scared of needles and I knew I would have to sometimes walk around in the units where Care Connector is running to conduct deployment testing and usability tests. I definitely did not want to faint on the job!

What kept me going was that I knew that if I managed to get through the summer I would have overcome my fears and been able to give back to my community by making the lives of patients and care team members a bit better by improving the user interfaces of the software they use on a daily basis.

Little did I know that this was not the only challenge I would go through. Throughout the summer I had to teach myself object oriented programming, while a project manager resigned and my boss left the institution.

When my team was cut by almost half, we all persevered and stayed positive (going to an axe throwing range helped). I even had the opportunity to lead the team through one Sprint over two weeks. This experience eventually made our team much stronger by properly communicating with each other and working efficiently with the tools that we had. It allowed us to reassess how we envisioned Care Connector and set our goals for the project.

I ended up learning so much from the change management process and really enjoyed working with the team that I agreed to continue working part-time. Up to now I have worked on several projects from developing AI chatbots to adding a new module from beginning to end. Seeing a project through involved writing requirement documents, designing mockups, developing, deploying, testing, presenting to stakeholders, and reiterating through the design process. Ask me about my experience creating a test suite and module requirements.