Business
My role as the Business Lead is to balance our group’s mission and our performance with academic and clinical care, and research within the available funding means.
Dr. Matthew Lax
Business, Activity Lead
About
Like all medical groups in our province, our radiology practice is funded through the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care of Ontario through a physician service agreement.
Our primary source of funding is limited to the physician generated income, which entirely supports our academic, teaching, and fellowship programs. Dr. Matthew Lax, our business lead, is also working on maximizing our participation and collaboration with the available government programs and grant services.
Goals
The primary goal of the business lead is investing time in scientific research, experimental development, collaboration, and collation. This will secure an established pathway to benefit our researchers by participating in available programs and grants to enhance the outcome of our research in both quality and quantity.
Effective research requires partnerships and resources, and our efforts have helped secure those for our groups successfully since 2005. We have been able to engage in more research activities and enhance their quality by working closely with some government programs, such as the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) Tax Credit Program that provides businesses and corporations with financial incentives to improve both the quality and quality of their research.
The connections we have made are some of our group’s biggest accomplishments and remain a work-in-progress as we discover new clinical and research opportunities.
Participation in Boards and Committees
Dr. Lax sits on the Board of Directors of the University Medical Imaging Consultants (UMIC) since 2002 and provides valuable contributions and opinions and advocates on our behalf to create symbiotic growth within the hospitals to both fulfil their institutional needs and advance our clinical and research interests. He also sits on the Academic Medical Organization (AMO), or the Alternative Funding Plan (AFP), committee to bring forward the voice of radiology in decision making across all of the practice plans at UHN and Sinai Health.
Challenges
In the light of the pandemic and with the uncertainty around patient volumes that it has brought, talent recruitment and retention has become one of the biggest challenges for healthcare.
In medical imaging, we don’t control patient inflow and can’t plan how many operating hours our machines will have and how many staff we will need to support patient care at any given time. We believe that the recruitment and retention issues will likely improve following the pandemic.
Due to COVID, our cooperation and participation in government programs to enhance the quality and quantity of our research is facing unique challenges. Because the applications take a lot of time to be approved, the pandemic has created a backlog of about four years. Our participation in government programs is hindered and dramatically slowed down by the pandemic and we have concerns that this will affect enhanced funding that we have achieved for research. Hopefully, this situation will improve following the pandemic.
New Reality
COVID has brought us some unexpected challenges not only professionally, but on a more personal level. The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we work, and we are unlikely to go back to our old normal. This has presented challenges to our interpersonal collegiality, and to some extent, may have harmed our cohesion.
We will evolve in response to COVID and the changes in how we do our work and work with each other, and we will ensure that we will thrive and embrace the challenges of this new reality.