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 | Apr 7, 2018 | eHealth, EHR, Hospitals, Security
An Ontario hospital last fall accounted for over three quarters of the exposed and unusued IP addresses or connected devices among medical institutions around the globe, according to research conducted by two security vendors.
Read more at https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/ontario-hospitals-exposure-of-tens-of-thousands-of-unused-ip-addresses-was-risky-says-study/403606
by medicaltechont | Jun 24, 2017 | Doctors, Education, Healthcare
“Each year, a growing number of students do not get matched, putting the hundreds of thousands of dollars that provincial governments invest in educating and training future doctors at risk.”
After he was passed over twice for a medical residency program, after he quizzed university officials and career counsellors about the reasons for his rejection, after exploring his legal options and shortly before ending his life, Robert Chu wrote a letter.
It was precise, but penned with passion. It showed the persistence the 25-year-old medical school graduate had demonstrated throughout his accomplished life.
But he also expressed his despair at what he believed is a flawed system used to match medical school graduates to residency programs — the final, obligatory stage in a doctor’s training.
Read more at https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/06/17/tragic-case-of-robert-chu-shows-plight-of-canadian-medical-school-grads.html
by medicaltechont | May 2, 2017 | Uncategorized
Things are looking bright for Dan Leibu and League Inc., a digital health and benefits platform he founded with three friends two years ago in Toronto.
League plans to triple staff to as many as 200 by the end of the year and start offering services in the U.S. The company provides an alternative to traditional benefit plans offered by insurers, targeting small and medium-sized businesses that appreciate its flexibility and easy access. It received $25 million in venture funding last year from one of Canada’s largest pension plans, among others.
“We’re just racing to catch up with the demand,” Leibu, 43, said in an interview in the company’s office in the MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub that fosters technology and medical start-ups like League in the city’s hospital row, where much of the country’s publicly funded science research is carried out.
Read more at http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/ontario-tech-sector-booms-as-trudeaus-innovation-strategy-starts-taking-shape
by medicaltechont | Apr 29, 2017 | Uncategorized
Physician S.S. (Sonny) Kohli was volunteering in Haiti after the devastating earthquake there in 2010, and he was treating a woman with chest pains.
“The usual course of action would be to do an EKG [electrocardiogram] and get a picture of her heart. It’s basic technology, relatively inexpensive, but not inexpensive enough for the hospital there.”
That’s when it dawned on him.
“The world needs inexpensive, portable medical technology that can leverage existing infrastructure, like the Internet and smartphones,” says Dr. Kohli, who is an internal medicine specialist and also helps run the intensive care unit at Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital in Southern Ontario.
Today, in addition to his regular medical duties, Dr. Kohli is an innovator – co-founder of a startup called Cloud DX, a spinoff of Mississauga medical tech company Biosign Technologies.
Read more online at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/the-star-trek-tricorder-inspired-this-device/article34661745/
