WINDSOR, ONTARIO (December 8, 2020) – For the second consecutive year, Symmetric Health Solutions (Symmetric) wins the SCAN Health Design Competition. The announcement was made today virtually at The Path Forward 2020, a premier supply chain healthcare event in partnership with SCAN HealthHIMSS and GS1 Canada.

The design competition challenged innovative healthcare companies and organizations around the world to develop a solution to the current, global challenge of determining product equivalencies for sourcing personal protective equipment (PPE) in health systems. The capacity to compare product attributes and technical specifications to determine whether a product can be substituted safely and perform effectively is critical for pandemic preparedness and to support public health efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19.

“As COVID-19 cases surged around the world, it became increasingly challenging to source required products. As a healthcare authority, we invested time and resources to identify alternate sources of protective masks and PPE,” says Mr. Ron Johnson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Eastern Health. “Eastern Health was able to collaborate with SCAN Health on this competition to recognize product equivalency in a consistent, accurate and efficient way."

Symmetric collaborated with Ascension and The Resource Group to demonstrate real-world evidence of impact it can achieve to create a detailed single source of truth for product data to determine product equivalence, particularly for pandemic related supplies. The application is built on cloud platforms which provide data volume and user scalability. Utilizing the latest in machine learning and technology, Symmetric has built thousands of processes to cleanse and combine data sets into a single source of truth by entity, shown alongside the primary source data.

Many competitive proposals were adjudicated by an international panel of judges including experts in supply chain, logistics and health system transformation. Judges include Mr. Ron Johnson (host), Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Eastern Health; Dr. Jayson Myers (partner), CEO, Next Generation Manufacturing Canada; Mr. David M. Marcelletti (chair of panel), Vice Chair Supply Chain Management, Mayo Clinic; Dr. Alex Mitchell, Clinician, Nova Scotia Health Authority; Mr. René Picard, Vice President, Supply Chain Transformation, McKesson Canada; Mr. Jitendra Prasad, Chief Program Officer, Contracting, Procurement and Supply Management, Alberta Health Services; Mr. Mike Schiller, Senior Director, Supply Chain, AHRMM; Mr. Altaf Stationwala, President and CEO, Mackenzie Health; Dr. Natalia Wilson, Adjunct Faculty, Arizona State University; and Mr. Steve Wretling, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, HIMSS.

SCAN Health extends sincere appreciation to the judging panel and all participants who put forward a solution to this critical, global challenge. It wishes to honorably mention the runner-up team DEFUSE, a collaboration between Intelligent Automation Inc., Haslam College of Business and Southeast Alabama Medical Center. This decision recognizes submissions based on the current design challenge. Visit www.SCANHealth.ca for details on the viable solutions proposed in the SCAN Health Design Competition 2020.

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About SCAN Health
SCAN Health is an international knowledge translation platform funded by the Government of Canada, Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) and hosted by the University of Windsor’s Odette School of Business. Spanning five countries, including Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada – and with over one hundred partners from industry, healthcare, government and academia – SCAN Health will advance global capacity to adopt and scale best practices in healthcare supply chain to offer traceability of products and care processes from bench to bedside to patient outcomes.