IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Currently, thousands of people are able to take advantage of the MyChart system. It allows patients to gain control over their care, not having to go through the process of contacting previous doctors, hospitals, walk-in clinics, and specialists to view personal medical records.

Some experts, however, are warning that too much information could potentially cause panic.

An increasing number of physicians, nurse practitioners and a host of other health-care providers have adopted electronic medical record systems in recent years, but there are significant growing pains using the programs – a phenomenon that stretches across North America.

Online health resources could do more harm than good for older adults, according to Julie Robillard, Assistant Professor of Neurology at UBC.

Robillard runs a lab at the David Mowafaghian Brain Centre. The research that goes on there looks at different types of information resources — particularly about dementia.

“We’re looking at many different types of online resources like self-tests, but also just websites and social media,” said Robillard.

A 2010 Statistics Canada survey found 64 out of 100 Canadians age 16 years or older searched the Internet for medical and health related information. Usage in United States is even higher; a 2011 survey found eight out of 10 Americans go online for health and medical reasons. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently estimated 17,828 health and fitness apps and 14,558 medical apps are currently available for mobile phones. These statistics illustrate how modern electronic technologies such as smart phones and tablets, coupled with social media and the Internet, are rapidly changing how the general public is seeking health information and services.

This scale and these challenges has been very effectively discussed in this feature article from the Globe’s latest Report on Business supplement – Take Two Apps and Call Me in the Morning.

It takes data to build a smart city, for without it, there is no way online programs and services designed to help residents could be developed. Consulting firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) notes that municipalities around the world have access to huge sources of urban data with the potential to improve the citizen experience – from sensors on bridges and other IoT sources, to new online databases of public information.

However, it adds, “one of the biggest smart city challenges is harnessing insights from urban data not properly governed or managed, making it unusable.”

There could soon be more jobs than qualified people in Canada's information and communications technology sector.

According to a new report released Tuesday morning by the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) - Outlook for Human Resources in the ICT Labour Market, 2011-2016 - while Canadian companies will be looking to hire approximately 106,000 new employees between 2011 and 2016 for ICT-related positions, there's a good chance there won't be enough qualified applicants to fill those positions.

Sidewalk Labs promised to build the city of the future, but public mistrust and fears of surveillance capitalism brought it down. Quayside 2.0 rises in its place, shifting the focus from technological control to sustainable urban living.

In December 2021, it all came to an end. Sidewalk Labs, the urban planning company, closed its ambitious smart city project in Toronto. The CEO left, and the company, which operated as a subsidiary of Alphabet, was absorbed back into its parent company. The Quayside project, which had been the subject of countless articles and was seen as a prototype for future cities, simply faded away. The tech giant would not plan, build, or operate a city from the ground up. There would be no wooden buildings covered with solar panels, no modular architecture for quick repurposing, no heated sidewalks to melt the snow, and no autonomous taxi system replacing streets. There would be no innovative canal system where industrial robots would empty trash and deliver mail, nor any climate management system to keep residents warm in winter and cool in summer.

The OutCare Foundation announced, last week, that telemedicine is now being used for palliative care throughout the Champlain region. Thanks to the success of its recent Telelink fundraising campaign, the foundation says more patients with a terminal illness can access the care they need.

Although the procurement of important (and often very expensive) e-Health technology infrastructure projects have very different structures and risks associated with them, they share one of the most common procurement mistakes – the frequent failure to fully and clearly define the procured technology in terms of its detailed operational, functional and technical specifications in the procurement contract.

Telehealth is the use of communication technologies, such as videoconferencing, to deliver health, wellness and educational services from a distance. Peripheral devices such as exam cameras, stethoscopes, portable ultrasound machines and ophthalmoscopes can be attached to videoconferencing units to enhance clinical sessions.

The experimental Telehealth program has been expanded to the northern B.C. communities of Hazelton, Houston, Kitwanga and Telkwa.

The Telehealth program is a provincial initiative which uses videoconferencing and other new technology to connect children and teenagers suffering from various mental illnesses to consult directly some of the best Canadian psychiatrists from Vancouver and other large cities.

Eastern Ontario is getting an extra $950,000 a year in provincial funding to expand a telemedicine program that allows rural residents to get speedier care closer to home.

The expanded program would allow more patients in the Ottawa Valley to meet by video conference with medical specialists at The Ottawa Hospital.

The health network is seeing an increase in the use of telemedine technology across Northeastern Ontario because it is such an effective tool to connect doctors and patients.

Colleen Harrison says her 10-month-old daughter Abigail burned her hand with a cup of tea. "I guess because of her age... she didn't know enough to take her hand out of it so she was kind of standing there with her hand in this freshly boiled cup of tea. And I pretty much knew right away it wasn't going to be a nice burn." Doctors in North Bay recomended Harrison attend the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto but she was able to have the burn examined via a camera feed between North Bay and Toronto.

Mr. Bushby, 57, is part of an Internet-based health-care program that monitors heart patients at home instead of requiring them to show up in person. Developed at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, the technology has saved him hours of travel for appointments – he lives in Abbotsford, B.C., about 70 kilometres away – and given him peace of mind, he says.

Alan Price had a successful career in the video game industry as chief technology officer for EA Canada.

But a desire to create games that would do more than simply entertain, combined with a transformation in his industry that has seen video games shift from consoles to smartphones and social networks, prompted Price to join the burgeoning digital health sector where he's creating wellness apps for kids.

Over and again, delegates to e-Health 2012: Innovating Health e-Care, Canada’s annual gathering of e-health administrators, suppliers and users, were told that monolithic, centralized e-health databases are as outmoded as fax machines and other electronic devices which have long been supplanted by superior technologies and more efficient ways of doing things.

It’s a bold new mobile world out there that is poised to revolutionize health care, Dr. John Hamalka, chief information officer of the Harvard (University) Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, said in his keynote address to the gathering in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Digital skills can no longer be seen as just an “IT” thing in government. A baseline level of digital literacy is need for every public servant.

Let’s take a step back in time 20 years to 1999. Personal computers were becoming more powerful and affordable, and increasingly a common part of work, school, and home life. The Internet as we know it was barely 10 years old. Web pages were starting to populate the World Wide Web at a dizzying rate. Governments were getting into the Internet scene, and Canada was kicking off its Government On-Line initiative, making available online 130 of its most commonly used services, spending $880 million to do it.

Just over a year later, SSC’s president Liseanne Forand returned to the Government Technology Exhibition and Conference to announce that 6,000 employees have been recruited from various government departments with timelines set for a 2015 delivery.

For our most vulnerable citizens, we need to create a trove of ‘what works’ data that will allow for help that is tailored to the individual.

Finding better ways of wiring for e-government is important and necessary. Nobody would disagree with the need for better computing, electronic communications and information management.