Neurosurgeon Teresa Purzner, at Kingston Health Sciences Centre, successfully revamped the hospital’s brain-tumour treatment program.Andres Valenzuela/The Globe and Mail
Not long after Teresa Purzner joined Kingston Health Sciences Centre as a neurosurgeon in 2021, she took a good, hard look at the hospital’s 19-step process for treating brain tumours.
Her conclusion: It wasn’t working.
“I realized that there wasn’t just one step that was the problem. The entire system was just inefficient,” she said.
Efficiency is a key focus for Dr. Purzner. After all, just a few years earlier she was juggling PhD studies at Stanford University, raising her kids and starting a nationally-selling baby-food company, all at the same time.
Using skills she had learned in the entrepreneurial world, she led a team that revamped the Kingston hospital’s brain-tumour treatment program in January, 2024. In the program’s first year, it has reduced delays for radiation treatment by 40 per cent and surgery volumes have more than doubled.
With other hospitals in Canada and Australia now looking into adopting the program, Dr. Purzner said it’s an example of how thinking from the business world could help improve the Canadian health care system’s struggles with long waiting times and excessive red tape.
Dr. Purzner grew up in Toronto and earned a bachelor’s in genetics and biotechnology at the University of Toronto, as well as a medical degree at Western University in London, specializing in neurosurgery.
She and her husband, Jamie Purzner – also a neurosurgeon and scientist, who now works alongside her in Kingston – left their residencies in Canada to focus on researching the root causes of brain tumours as graduate students at Stanford University, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.
During her studies, she had three children and – in what she calls a “side interest” – started a baby-food company.
“I realized there was this huge gap between what kids should be eating and what they actually get in baby food, and so I started developing food for my own kids,” she said, which had lower sugar than other options.
Dr. Purzner took a business class and, with help from her professor, set up a company called Cerebelly. The company started selling direct-to-consumer, and then got picked up by Whole Foods Market Inc., now selling in 14,000 stores across North America. She sits on the board and advises on innovation, while the company is run day-to-day by a chief executive officer and a staff of more than two dozen.
She said the experience taught her some crucial differences between academia and entrepreneurship. Academics, she felt, were very astute at identifying and analyzing problems that matter to people.
Entrepreneurs, by contrast, “sometimes struggle to find really meaningful problems. Even working with brilliant people, it’s almost as if sometimes they’re making up problems to solve, just to solve something.” For example, she cited the tech industry’s focus on dating and travel apps.
When Dr. Purzner arrived in Kingston in 2021 and started to lead a revamping of the brain-tumour program, she wanted to marry her entrepreneurial experience with her clinical background. She used a design-thinking approach she learned at business school in which she started out with a goal (to “create the best possible brain tumour program”) and not a preconceived notion of what the solution would be.
Her team conducted interviews of 43 doctors, patients and others participating in brain tumour treatment, and analyzed the last 1,500 cases to look for places where patients fell through the cracks.
For example, Kingston Health Sciences Centre serves a large stretch of rural Ontario and those residents “aren’t complainers,” Dr. Purzner said. “If they don’t hear from their doctor, they just assume there’s nothing to be heard.”
So as the team started to prototype different ways to improve efficiency, a focus became making sure that patients had checklists and expectations of every step in the journey. The hospital created a patient navigator position to be a central point of contact who could promptly respond to patients’ questions.
Ultimately, the hospital believes the Integrated Brain Tumour Program has paid off.
The number of patients receiving surgery within provincial targets increased by more than 40 per cent in the first year, and post-operative MRI scans are now performed in a timely manner for 89 per cent of patients, up from 40 per cent previously. The number of patients being treated went to 105 from 46.
“We’re providing care to twice the patients with a much, much higher level of efficiency,” Dr. Purzner said. “It’s been kind of cool.”
