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 | Oct 25, 2013 | emr, Technology
Ninety-six per cent of Canadians think it’s important that the health care system make use of digital health tools and capabilities, and 89 per cent feel it is important that they personally have full advantage of digital health tools and capabilities, according to a new survey by Harris/Decima, released by Canada Health Infoway (Infoway).
Other key findings from the Harris/Decima report include:
86 per cent of Canadians agree that digital health will provide health information to a care team in an emergency situation
86 per cent of Canadians believe it is important that their doctors use electronic medical records
90 per cent of Canadians who access their own health information online describe the experience as positive
Every day, more of Canada’s health care system goes digital. It’s a private, secure and effective way to make health care better, for all of us. Today, patients like Alexa Thompson use digital health to help manage their care and wellness.
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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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