Health Minister Mary Schryer said the provincial government has created the technology that will make it possible for health-care providers to switch to a 'one patient, one record' model, but staff must be trained to use the system and protocols and policies have to be created before the program is ready to launch.
Family practitioners and medical facilities create and maintain patient files for each person who visits them for care.
When the province switches to e-health records, every New Brunswicker will be assigned an electronic file - a personal medical record that contains a patient's medical history and records visits they've made to all medical facilities.
The data will be available to health-care professionals across the province through a secure computer database, available only to people with the proper security clearance.
Schryer said it's almost time to begin the next phase of the project.
"The IT section is done. In the fall, we will go live so that users will start to be trained on how to implement information within the system," she said.
She said the process of switching to e-health records will happen in stages, until it's expanded to include every entry point in New Brunswick's health-care system.
"We're going to start with (emergency rooms), the tertiary services - such as dialysis, oncology, gynecology - will be the first users to start implementing information," she said.
"Then we'll be looking at (family) physicians across the province - how we're going to get them online as well. So when I actually go to the doctor's office, or you go to the doctor's office, that they have the ability to pull up your record. If you went to the ER in Bathurst, they should be able to know that and what the results were."
Schryer said the new model should improve patient care.
"The patient's outcome and the patient's safety come into play here. When you can look at everything on one screen, you know you can see all the drugs that client may be on, is there any problems with issuing a new drug or taking them off a drug too soon - all those precautions are even more magnified when you have one system," she said.
And she believes it will also reduce costs in the system.
"It'll stop duplication - maybe the same blood work is being ordered. So it's vital."
Schryer said more work has to be done before the system is ready for use, but that should also give them time to work out kinks in the system and put in place the proper protections.
"We're going live in the fall with the health-care professionals, putting the data in," she said. "And that will take another year at least for everybody (to ensure the system is completely ready). People come in (to the system) in stages."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Adam Bowie
Quelle/Source: The Daily Gleaner, 13.08.2010
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