Continuous quest for innovation in care is key to self-renewal, says Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg
At Public Information Meeting, CIUSSS’s President and CEO cautions against opting for the status quo
The 10th annual Public Information Meeting of CIUSSS West-Central Montreal.
Despite the success of many recent improvements to health care and social services in CIUSSS West-Central Montreal, staff have been urged by Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, the network’s President and CEO, to resist the temptation to rest on their laurels.
Speaking on October 22 at the CIUSSS’s 10th annual Public Information Meeting at the Jewish General Hospital, Dr. Rosenberg said the quest for improvement and innovation should be never-ending—an ongoing commitment to finding better ways to ease pain and enhance the well-being of healthcare users.
“Our vitality and self-renewal have largely sprung from our determination not to conduct business as usual—in other words, not to accept the status quo and not simply to keep providing more of the same,” he explained.
“If you just choose to be satisfied with what you’ve done, you lose the incentive to work more quickly, efficiently, effectively and economically. Before long, the healthcare user ceases to be uppermost in your mind.
Morty Yalovsky, Chair of the CIUSSS Board of Directors
“This is why I remain so adamant about pursuing the benefits of technological innovation and research. Our job is not simply to apply time-tested remedies. Our responsibility is to search for superior solutions, apply them, and then start looking for something even better.”
The Public Information Meeting was an opportunity for the public to hear about the most noteworthy of the CIUSSS’s achievements in 2024-2025 and to ask questions of top administrators and senior healthcare staff. Awards of Excellence were also presented to exceptional employees and teams based in sites across the CIUSSS.
Among the examples of innovation that Dr. Rosenberg cited was a pair of outstanding programs, each of which won a coveted Prix transformateur (Transformation Prize) the previous week at the Hippocrate Awards ceremony:
- The Patient Timeline, a ground‑breaking module of the Connected Health Record (CHR), is enabling staff to gather health information about patients more quickly and easily, in order to deliver care that’s prompter and timelier. (At the Public Information Meeting, the CHR team received the President and CEO Award of Honour.)
- The PRISM Program, which is geared to adults who are experiencing homelessness and mental health disorders, helps them get off the streets and, eventually, move into housing of their own.
“All of this intense activity is being undertaken not to win prizes or merely to explore new technology,” Dr. Rosenberg said. “Its objective is to provide comfort, information, treatment and support to people who, in many cases, are fighting some of the toughest battles of their lives.
Erin Cook, Associate CEO, and Gary Stoopler, Associate Executive Director
“Innovation is what allows us to advance our user‑centred mission of Care Everywhere—a commitment to achieving the right outcomes by providing the right care at the right time in the location that is safest, most appropriate and most convenient for users.”
Morty Yalovsky, Chair of the CIUSSS Board of Directors, told the audience Santé Québec is still in the process of defining the details in the role and mandate of the conseil d’administration d’établissement (CAE), the governance body that leads each CIUSSS or CISSS.
However, he said, each CAE will be involved in preserving the cultural and linguistic character of its member facilities, while taking on added responsibility for the academic mission, research and innovation—areas where “our CIUSSS is very, very strong and powerful, which is reflected in the fact that many of our teams have won external awards, such as the Prix Hippocrate.”
In her remarks, Erin Cook, the CIUSSS’s Associate CEO, praised OROT, the network’s Connected Health Innovation Hub, for enabling “our healthcare professionals to work closely with entrepreneurs, clinicians, data experts and numerous other professionals to develop practical innovations that respond to everyday needs.”
Émilie Blackburn, Associate Commissioner of Complaints and the Quality of Service
In particular, Ms. Cook referred to close cooperation among OROT, the C4 (Command Centre) Team and partners in the private sector in acquiring $1 million in grants to develop customized AI models to better manage patient flow at the JGH.
Gary Stoopler, Associate Executive Director of the CIUSSS, explained that in 2024‑2025, the Nursing Directorate enhanced its use of data and deployed 30 digital dashboards across most units and clinics.
These dashboards enable nurses to gather crucial data and key indicators in a central location—information about everything from hand hygiene to fall prevention—to enable teams to act quickly to identify priorities and tailor realistic action plans.
Also noted by Ms. Cook and Mr. Stoopler:
- Building on the success of the Flu SWAT Team, the Acute Home Care Program provided intensive nursing care at home to about 600 seniors whose clinical condition had been exacerbated between April 2024 and May 2025.
- Thanks to the Avoidable Transfer Committee, the proportion of transfers from long-term care to acute care that are considered to be avoidable was cut from 18.6% to just 9.3%.
- After nearly two years of renovation in the Department of Radiology, the JGH inaugurated a pair of CT scanners that use artificial intelligence to enhance images that are produced by exposing patients to lower doses of radiation. This project received substantial support from principal donors Carol and Neil Weinman through the JGH Foundation.
Included in the agenda was an overview of the year’s activities of Commission of Complaints and the Quality of Service, delivered by its Associate Commissioner, Émilie Blackburn.
Many CHR employees were present when their team received the President and CEO Award of Honour.
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