• MD BScEng CCFP 
• Executive Director and Owner, Apix Performance 
• Assistant Professor of Medicine, Northern Ontario School of Medicine at Laurentian and Lakehead Universities 

Douglas Woodhouse is a physician-engineer and is the Executive Director of Apix Performance. Douglas applies tools and techniques from other industries in healthcare to improve efficiency and safety. He has expertise in Lean, Theory of Constraints, Statistical Process Control and Change Management and has worked with over 70 healthcare teams throughout Europe and North America to improve their clinical processes.

Douglas graduated as a Family Physician at the University of Alberta and obtained his medical degree at Queen’s University. He has worked as a hospitalist, emergency physician and in primary care. Douglas works as a physician in a hospital-based practice and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

Previously, Douglas worked as a Senior Consultant at Plexus (now KPMG-Plexus), a leading consultancy in European healthcare. At Plexus, Douglas was primarily responsible for clinical change management projects.

Douglas has a degree in Mechanical Engineering and engineering work experience. He was responsible for process design and quality control for a large electronics manufacturing company and previously ran his own business providing consulting services for enterprise resource planning software.

Examples of Recent Work

• Guest presenter of a British Medical Journal webinar based on the published article “Cycle Time: The New Wait Time” on the BMJ Quality Blog [Link]
• Invited speaker on “Streamlining Referrals from Primary to Secondary Care” at the Canadian Medical Association National Health Policy and Negotiations Conference, 2011 [Link]
• Presented “Ensuring safe and reliable care for elderly patients” at the British Medical Journal International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare in 2010 and 2011 [Link]
• Benchmarked international blood product costs (Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, France, Ireland) including development of an activity-based costing model [Link]
• First author of “Will Benchmarking in ICUs Improve Outcome?” published in 2009 by peer-reviewed journal Current Opinion in Critical Care [Link]
• Peer reviewer of “Safer Clinical Systems” for The Health Foundation, UK [Link]