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 | Oct 10, 2012 | e-Health, eHealth, Healthcare, Hospitals, Ontario, Technology
The case for electronic medical records is compelling: They can make health care more efficient and less expensive, and improve the quality of care by making patients’ medical history easily accessible to all who treat them.
Small wonder that the idea has been promoted by the Obama administration, with strong bipartisan and industry support. The government has given $6.5 billion in incentives, and hospitals and doctors have spent billions more.
But as health care providers adopt electronic records, the challenges have proved daunting, with a potential for mix-ups and confusion that can be frustrating, costly and even dangerous.
Some doctors complain that the electronic systems are clunky and time-consuming, designed more for bureaucrats than physicians. Last month, for example, the public health system in Contra Costa County in California slowed to a crawl under a new information-technology system.
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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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