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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by medicaltechont | May 4, 2013 | Canada, emr
In Nova Scotia, the Department of Health and Wellness (DHW) has decided to award a contract for its preferred EMR system to Ontario-based Nightingale Informatix Corporation, much to the dismay of software vendors in the local region.
Click here to read more.
by medicaltechont | Nov 12, 2012 | Canada, e-Health, eHealth, emr, Healthcare, Ontario, Ontario MD
After Helmut Braun’s wife died, he turned to the Internet to find someone else to play cards with. Before long, like so many Canadian seniors these days, he’d become something of a keyboard wizard. But when Braun had a heart attack last November, the 85-year-old former barber figured he’d played his last online ace. As he lay in frightening pain in an ambulance, the last thing he could have guessed was that he would soon become a cyber-pioneer. But that’s what happened in the long-term palliative care ward at Baycrest Health Sciences Centre in north Toronto.
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by medicaltechont | Sep 22, 2012 | Canada, e-Health, emr, Software, Technology
TORONTO – The Ontario government has spent nine years and billions of dollars trying to make its troubled eHealth program work.
And despite repeated assurances from the government, that progress is being made, many doctors still struggle to get timely access to basic medical records and patients continue to face needless risks and treatment delays the program has failed to deliver what the public was promised – efficient access to electronic health records.
One Burlington family doctor became so frustrated, he hired college students to see if they could help him fix the electronic mess the government left in his office.
They did.
He was able to easily and inexpensively turn unfriendly electronic patient information programs into a helpful tool he can actually use when sitting in front of a patient.
But Dr. John Holmes said that while one eHealth Ontario official showed up at his office to see what he’d done, the organization clearly wasn’t interested in learning from his experience.
As a frontline health care provider and as a taxpayer, that indifference doesn’t sit well with Holmes.
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by medicaltechont | Mar 2, 2010 | Canada, emr, Technology
Ontario must move faster with a series of legislative and regulatory measures in order to meet its commitment to create electronic health records for all residents by 2015, a senior official with eHealth Ontario says.
“It’s time the province decided if it’s really committed to this or not,” argues Doug Tessier, senior vice-president of development and implementation for the agency responsible for implementing the government’s multibillion-dollar electronic health records (EHR) strategy.
Progress on the province’s EHR file was hampered by the eHealth Ontario scandal surrounding compensation for consultants, Tessier says. The scandal triggered an audit, which concluded that the provincial government mismanaged over $1 billion and ultimately led to the resignations of former health minister David Caplan and former deputy minister of health Ron Sapsford.
“The swirl and scandal has hurt us,” says Tessier, considered the government’s expert on electronic health systems.
But Ontario’s EHR woes predate the scandal, Tessier says, arguing that there have consistently been delays in making key political decisions since the province first committed to implementation in 2000.
Deliberations on major decisions within the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care have often taken two years, Tessier says. “If you are really committed to this, two years is too long. … To my mind, if the government is not committed to something, they hem and haw.”
Moreover, even the basic, legal framework for patient EHRs — which will require changes to laws governing patient record management and privacy — still isn’t in place, more than seven years after the province established the agency, Tessier says. Not only are “two or three pieces of new legislation” still required, “but we’ve also got to undo a number of pieces of [existing] legislation.”
The government must also do more persuade health regulatory colleges to overhaul policies that impact on EHRs, Tessier argues. “Let’s put our arm around them and gently bring them into the 21st century. … With the regulations, the legislation and the policy changes that government has to do, that’s not so gentle. That’s on the critical path. If they don’t do it, we’re blocked completely.”
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