by medicaltechont | Jun 9, 2018 | Canada, Cloud, e-Health, eHealth, Election, Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare, Hospitals, Medical Records, Technology
I have been a family physician practising in this province for 30 years. It is a great joy looking after my patients. However, looking after them in the health care quagmire of disconnected information and bureaucratic silos is becoming a nightmare. It is alarming seeing my young colleagues bewildered so early in their careers, and new graduates of family medicine are afraid to set up practice.
The province is carved up into 14 Local Health Integration Networks and 76 sub-LHINs each seemingly reinventing the wheel while consultants analyze the same things over and over again. There is an obsession with accountability frameworks designed by this ever growing bureaucracy that has little idea about what we actually do and what tools we need to do our job.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on a huge array of electronic repositories and information systems that don’t integrate at the most basic level with each other years after they were built. Providers spend countless hours trying to locate who does what where and what hoops to jump through to get appointments. We fax long paper forms with lab and other reports that are somehow not available from these expensive repositories. We typically access each other by phone in the absence of electronic messaging capabilities.
Read more at https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/8651966-survival-at-the-front-lines-of-the-health-care-quagmire/
by medicaltechont | Jun 4, 2018 | Canada, Doctors, e-Health, eHealth, Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare, Ontario, Privacy, Toronto
A total of 5,063 public elementary students were suspended in Toronto this school year after getting caught in what one doctor called, a “1970s-style, cumbersome process” over immunization records.
The number of students suspended amounted to 7 per cent of the 73,262 elementary students in 586 Toronto public elementary schools assessed by Toronto Public Health from July to mid-December 2017. That’s a jump from 5.6 per cent last year.
“All of the students who were suspended either didn’t meet the immunization requirements as they were not up-to-date, their records were not filed on time, or they did not have a valid exemption,” said Dr. Vinita Dubey, associate medical officer at Toronto Public Health.
Read more at https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/02/14/over-5000-elementary-school-kids-suspended-in-toronto-for-out-of-date-immunization-records.html
by medicaltechont | Jun 2, 2018 | e-Health, eHealth, Ontario, Ontario MD, OntarioMD, Technology
A new partnership will benefit clients of the new Good Doctors Medical walk-in clinic that opened in Espanola last week.
OntarioMD and the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) are partnering to streamline the delivery of digital health services.
Read more at https://www.myespanolanow.com/16851/ontariomd-and-ontario-telemedicine-network-digital-delivery/
by medicaltechont | Jan 27, 2018 | Apple, e-Health, eHealth, EHR, Electronic Medical Records, Medical Records, Technology
Apple has announced a solution to bring health records to the iPhone, aiming to make things easier for users to access their medical information.
Right now, accessing your health data can be a real hassle and it may not always be easy to find a lab test or some other such record. With this in mind, Apple wants to make medical records easily accessible on the go, on iPhones.
Apple Bringing Medical Records To iPhones
Patients would previously have their medical records in multiple locations, which often required them to piece all information together, from each health care provider, manually. Together with the healthcare community, Apple created Health Records based on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR for short, which is a standard designed for the transfer of digital records.
Read more at http://www.techtimes.com/articles/219755/20180127/apple-is-bringing-digital-health-records-to-the-iphone.htm
by medicaltechont | Dec 31, 2016 | Doctors, e-Health, Electronic Medical Records, Ontario, Technology
“For example, wouldn’t it make sense that anytime a patient has lab tests completed anywhere in the province that the results of these tests would be immediately sent to the records in each of their doctors’ offices?”
Minister Eric Hoskins’ Bill 41 continues to be confounding for many physicians, but possibly the most consistent question I am hearing is: Why do we need another layer of bureaucracy? How will sub-LHINs improve the system? One very intriguing twitter answer that I received suggested that this extra bureaucratic layer will serve as “administrative infrastructure” for primary care. That is something worth considering since I agree that Family Doctors need much more support than they are currently receiving.
Before I move directly into the discussion, I want to stress that I am not including those primary care providers who are not physicians in this consideration. The reason is that I want to focus on the infrastructure resources needed to deliver primary care and the Nurse Practitioner- led clinics are tremendously well-resourced, with all expenses already covered by the government, a luxury that physicians cannot access to the same degree which is the point here.
Read more at https://drgailbeck.com/2016/10/28/bill-41-infrastructure-investment/
by medicaltechont | Dec 5, 2016 | e-Health, Ontario MD, OntarioMD, Technology
TORONTO — Health Minister Eric Hoskins says he’ll act on a recommendation to give patients access to their electronic medical records as the province updates the mandate of eHealth Ontario.
The Liberal government’s privatization czar, Ed Clark, recommended eHealth’s role be refocused more on service delivery, and said patients should be able to interact with their own personal health information.
“We must bring patients into the system and give them access to their own information, and in doing so we must continue to focus on security and privacy of patient health records,” he said. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t build an app to connect into that (eHealth system of electronic medical records).”
Read more at http://www.bnn.ca/ontario-will-not-sell-ehealth-assets-as-ed-clark-says-agency-worth-5-7b-1.613980
