There is little doubt that Canada requires a seismic shift in policy and leadership – though not necessarily additional significant investment – to make the needed improvements in health care delivery. This is made abundantly clear in the Health Council of Canada’s Progress Report 2013: Health Care Renewal in Canada; an impressive report that captures …
In the last decade, technology has revolutionized the way we live and work. We email and text more often than we phone or fax. We share photos with friends using Facebook and debate with colleagues in real-time using Twitter. We pay bills, book plane tickets, and buy clothes on-line. We can effortlessly post opinionated blogs …
When I joined the Ambulatory Practice of the Future (APF) as a first-year resident, I learned that the primary care clinic had an open notes policy: whatever we wrote about our patients could be seen by our patients through a secure online portal. It was a startling departure from medicine’s tradition of records shrouded in …
In the internet age there is an unprecedented amount of information available to anyone with access to the web. In health care, this is slowly shifting power dynamics, with patients taking increased responsibility and ownership of their health. What needs to be done so a health care system built in the 20th century can address …
An E Health scandal? The real E Health scandal is that we don’t have an electronic health system. In an age of Google and 4G smart phones– the health system still functions largely with paper and fax. What we need is a fully integrated complex data system that not only has patient information in it …
More and more doctors across Canada are using electronic medical records to keep track of their patients’ health information. Finding a patient’s information record in most electronic medical databases involves entering the first few letters of each name, hitting <Enter> and choosing the appropriate person from the resulting drop-down list. Recently while looking up one …
Patients are increasingly interested in reading the information in their own medical records. Canadian laws and existing technologies support this in principle. However, most patients are not yet easily able to access their medical records in practice. Canadians today have easy access to a range of systems that store their personal information. The difference between …