by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2014 | Healthcare, Physiotherapy
CORNWALL – The Ontario government has made it a little easier for patients looking for physiotherapy to receive the help they need without having to deal with private insurance companies. OHIP announced patients will now have access to OHIP funded physiotherapy services in 24 pt Health physiotherapy clinics across Ontario.
Cornwall Physiotherapy on South Branch Road has always been an OHIP funded clinic and clinic director Amanda Peltsch said it was changes to the way OHIP funded physiotherapy services that made the impact.
“With the changes that happened in August, other clinics were able to apply for contracts to provide OHIP services,” said Peltsch, “We were already one of the original OHIP providers, so we automatically were granted a contract. We are allocated a certain amount of episodes of care to apply to OHIP clients.”
Peltsch said now any physiotherapy clinic in Ontario can apply for the OHIP contracts.
“That’s why we are seeing more OHIP providers,” she said.
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by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2014 | emr, private clinics
TORONTO — Ontario’s Liberal government is putting community hospitals and medicare at risk with a plan to turn a wide range of services over to private clinics that will extra bill patients, a health care advocacy group warned Monday. The Ontario Health Coalition said taking such things as diagnostic services, physiotherapy and operations like cataract surgeries out of hospitals and having them provided by private clinics is a direct threat to publicly-funded medicare.
“This is a giant step towards American-style private health care, there’s no question,” said coalition executive director Natalie Mehra. “Virtually all of the private clinics that exist in Canada bill the public health system and they charge extra user fees too. That’s illegal under the Canada Health Act, but that’s routine in the private clinics.” Patients going to private clinics in Ontario can be billed up to $1,300 in extra fees for cataract surgery, while people looking for endoscopies or colonoscopies face fees of $80 to $200 above what’s billed to OHIP, said Mehra.
“These are services patients have paid for already through our taxes, and the private clinics are bringing in two-tier health care,” she said. “The Ministry of Health has turned a blind eye to these charges, and is now expanding the private clinic sector.” Health Minister Deb Matthews was unavailable for comment Monday, but her office said the government was committed to “move more routine, low-risk procedures into the community” through non-profit clinics.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ontario-patient-group-seeks-to-stop-shift-of-some-services-to-private-sector-1.1722323#ixzz2w2mluJp0
by medicaltechont | Mar 15, 2014 | eHealth, EHR, Software
A Fredericton doctor says the province’s new electronic medical records system has created an uneven playing field.
Dr. Doug Varty was one of about 60 doctors who adopted electronic records before the new system was introduced.
He says he is out tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work because the Department of Health and the New Brunswick Medical Society went with a program that no one was using.
In addition, Varty won’t be able to link to the provincial system, he said.
“That’s a very important part of any EMR is being able to download your data — you know, your lab reports, your X-ray reports, consultant reports and all those sorts of things, automatically, and in a timely fashion. And we’re being denied that,” Varty said.
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by medicaltechont | Jan 2, 2014 | Cloud, e-Health, eHealth, Ontario, Privacy, Technology
We are using the cloud more and more. As Internet connections get faster and more reliable, the convenience of having all our data available on all our devices becomes ever more attractive.
However, there are disadvantages to using cloud services, particularly the free of charge ones that still have to make a profit somehow. There are many valid, albeit scary, questions you’ll want to mull over before trusting a third party to keep your data safe and we’ve listed them below.
The answers, as you will discover, in this feature are generally not what you want to hear:
- Privacy – is your data stored or is it being mined for advertising and marketing purposes?
- Reliability – can you be certain that the service you’re using will always be available? What guarantees do you have regarding the safety of your data and is there anything you can do to improve this?
- Security – is your data encrypted? Who has access to the encryption keys? Could your data be hacked or stolen?
- Continuity – Can the cloud provider suspend or cancel your account, possibly even losing all your data, for any reason?
- Performance – Is your Internet connection fast enough to use the services you want without delays?
- Copyright – who owns the content you upload? Can your photos be sold or published without your consent?
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by medicaltechont | Nov 16, 2013 | Canada, EHR
As an American and Canadian dual national, I found this EHR Intelligence article about dueling surveys as amusing as it was informative. It seems that Canadians are much more receptive to EHRs than Americans. According to a 2012 Harris Decima survey, a whopping 85 percent of Canadians thought that EHRs were a good or very good idea. Moreover, more than half of them had no privacy or other concern about their records being in electronic format.
Contrast that to a Harris Interactive survey for Xerox conducted around the same time which found that 85 percent of Americans expressed “anxiety” about having their records digitized. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) feared that a hacker would steal their personal data; half worried that the data would be lost, damaged or corrupted. Only one-quarter (26 percent) said that they wanted their medical records to be digitized.
Read more: Canadian attitude towards EHRs may be healthier than ours – FierceEMR http://www.fierceemr.com/story/canadian-attitude-towards-ehrs-may-be-healthier/2013-10-30#ixzz2kpumgFyK
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