“When you look at how far countries have moved towards a broader vision of electronic health information capability, Canada is not doing too badly,” Pascal says.
Weiterlesen: Canadian physicians playing "catch-up" in adopting electronic medical records
While the Ontario government is dealing with the political fallout of the eHealth Ontario scandal and Ottawa reviews its funding commitments to Canada Health Infoway, a new research report suggests Canada may need to fill approximately 12,000 IT-related health-care jobs within the next five years.
Weiterlesen: Canada faces widespread e-health skills shortage
But given the allegations of criminal misconduct tied directly to the letting of contracts for the "E health" initiative, one has to wonder if there are enough safeguards in place to ensure that millions of dollars aren't wasted.
The E health initiative was in both 2007 and 2008 throne speeches of the B.C. Liberal government and the B.C. Medical Association has signed on as a partner of sorts.
Getting Canada on track to make electronic health and medical records more efficient has had its ups and downs, but to date, there are nearly 300 projects under way, which have already helped save money, speed up some processes and improve care.
It's been about nine years since efforts to get each Canadian's health and medical profile in digital format got a boost with the creation of Canada Health Infoway and $500-million in initial federal funding to invest in electronic health record (EHR) projects with the provinces and territories, which also support their own eHealth work.
So it was disappointing news when researchers from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and at the University of Oviedo published their most recent Broadband Quality Score. The report, sponsored by Cisco, found that Canada ranked 30th among the countries surveyed, a drop from last year’s already lowly 26th spot. Moreover, among 100 cities surveyed, Vancouver ranked 46th, Montreal 69th, Ottawa 81st and Toronto 82nd in broadband quality.