How We Are Impacting Healthcare

Transforming Patient Visits

Clinicians report that using Ocean patient history and screening forms can reduce appointment time requirements by as much 65%, while allowing more time spent face-to-face with the patient. By automating administrative tasks like email consent and demographic updates, clinics can also achieve greater efficiencies.

Giving Patients a Way to Directly Affect their Health Record

Over 1.5M patient record EMR updates have been completed by patients in waiting rooms and exam rooms across the country using Ocean to date.

Transforming Patient Records and Making Data Accessible

By replacing the scanning of paper forms with digital data entry, patient records are structured, higher quality, and available for retrospective data analysis.

Lowering the Cost and Barriers to Clinical Research at the Point of Care

With the option to conduct clinical research on a tablet at the point of care without concerns to patient privacy, researchers can reduce per-survey costs by a factor of ten over traditional paper-based survey methods.

Creating the Largest Library of Openly Available Clinical Questionnaires

The Ocean Library has over 2000 patient-facing forms and questionnaires, including hundreds of standardized and clinically validated questionnaires with scoring and clinical decision support built in. The library, which is growing every week, is the largest of its kind.

Providing EMR-Agnostic Support for Mobile Tools

Ocean already integrates with multiple EMRs, and with its recent API, other EMR vendors can now use the platform collect and share patient data at the point of care, while automatically updating the EMR patient record.

What We Believe In

CognisantMD is committed to improving healthcare by creating patient engagement tools that benefit clinicians, administrative staff, and the patients they treat. To that end, we are committed to the following principles:

We believe in sharing content and best practices for the greater good of healthcare professionals and the patients they serve.

The name “Ocean” originated from the idea of an Open Clinical Encounter Assistance Network; a place where clinicians could develop and share tools to improve patient care. Our library continues to remain open to this day, and as a result has developed into the largest library of clinical and administrative tools openly available to clinicians.

The privacy and security of healthcare data is always our first priority.

Our commitment to data privacy and security led us to design a system that employs encryption techniques that prevent anyone from accessing client patient data other than the data owner – including CognisantMD staff. All our data is stored within Canada, and our platform meets the most stringent requirements for healthcare data including PHIPA and HIPAA. For research studies, anonymized data stores remain the property of the customer; we will never release or sell data to third parties.

We do not accept funding from pharmaceutical companies.

We are firmly committed to avoiding conflicts of interest that could arise from a relationship with a pharmaceutical firm or other private firm with an intrinsic bias towards commercial aims. The Ocean platform is supported entirely by revenue from clinicians, health care organizations, public health groups, non-profit quality improvement organizations and research teams serving patients and the healthcare industry more broadly.

Cognisant Causes

What is the Cognisant Causes program?

Cognisant Causes is a program designed to “give back” to the healthcare community. The program allows CognisantMD employees to spend their Friday afternoons working pro-bono on a worthy healthcare cause of their choice. We started this program because we saw many promising healthcare initiatives that never got off the ground because there wasn’t enough funding for technology, or the grant process was too onerous. Ironically, some of the best ideas are the simplest, and that’s where we can step in to help.

What qualifies?

Projects must be small in scope and high in value towards a public healthcare good — five hours a week doesn’t go far on ambitious projects. We look for projects that need a little bit of technical expertise to help out people working on a great cause. A good example is our first project: an Ontario Trillium funding calculator on a tablet for patients in the waiting room. If even one family learns about the program and a child gets better treatment as a result, we’re thrilled.

Does it have to run on Ocean?

We like using our platform because it’s a really easy way to deploy clinical questionnaires and research studies. However, there are no rules for employees on this point. Employees are free to use any and all tools and skills they can bring to bear on a problem — they could build a website for example. We have a physician, a marketing expert and a few software developers in the office so we have a bit of diversity in our organization we can bring to the table as well.

How do you get involved?

If you’re a researcher or clinician needing a bit of technical help or advice, send us an email at info@cognisantmd.com with a brief summary of what you’re looking for. We’ll try to get back to you within one business day.