Electronic health record
eHealth initiatives allowing MDs greater access to patients’ clinical information
Physicians are now able to access significantly more clinical information about their patients as a number of eHealth Ontario’ s initiatives come to fruition. In a progress report to Council, Cindy Morton, CEO of eHealth Ontario, said the Electronic Health Record( EHR) system continues to build and link systems, enabling growing numbers of physicians to share and access patients’ personal health information across the province.
Cindy Morton
Clinicians, for example, are now able to share digital images reports across the province( see article on page 36). And since December 2016, health-care providers at three Guelph organizations have been given, as part of a pilot project, access to up-to-date information about their patients’ medication histories. The information available to these clinicians include pharmacy services( for example, vaccine administration, MedsCheck Program, Fecal Occult Blood Test Kits), and the publicly funded drugs and monitored drugs, including narcotics and controlled substances, that have been dispensed to their patients.
One of the next steps – which will begin with a pilot this year – will be to incorporate primary care information into the EHR system, said Ms. Morton. Eventually, she said, patients will be able to access their own electronic health record in order to better manage their own care. The goal, she said, is to ensure that every Ontario citizen has an electronic health record. Achieving that goal will improve the efficiency of clinical decision-making by providing a more complete picture of patient health information across the continuum of care. It will give physicians: faster access to patient information; more time for patient care by reducing the amount of time
spent on administrative tasks; the ability to better manage, coordinate and plan patient care; and an improved ability to monitor patient outcomes.
The College’ s eHealth Statement in 2013 anticipated such progress and set out the physician’ s role in developing eHealth literacy and emphasized the importance of eHealth connectivity for good practice.“ As a health-care provider, the physician’ s role is to provide quality care to patients and meet the evolving standards of the profession, no matter what tools, processes or resources are used,” the statement reads. In fact, it is becoming clear that physicians must embrace the new technologies. A recent report from Ed Clark, a business advisor to the Wynne government, urged the Ontario government and regulatory bodies, like the College, to take a more directive approach in ensuring physicians move towards digitization. It was a direction that found favour with Eric Hoskins, Ontario Minister of Health and Long-Term Care.“ In an increasingly connected and mobile world, we must accelerate the work done to make progress on digital health, but we must also make sure this is done in concert with a strategy that puts patients at the centre,” he said.
Ms. Morton acknowledged to Council that EHR adoption by physicians has been challenged by the fact that many IT systems and software applications are neither as inter-operable at this time as they should be, nor is shared information governance as well-established as it needs to be. She told Council that eHealth Ontario is working on“ merging the most critical patient information from disparate systems and putting it into this space [ the EHR ]”. She added that the“ next chapter” will allow physicians
... continued on page 36 photo: clAUDIA hung
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Dialogue Issue 4, 2016