The head of eHealth Ontario says the agency has emerged from a spending scandal and will deliver electronic health records for all patients within five years.
Greg Reed, in an exclusive interview with the Star, said after six months on the job he’s confident his revamped team can deliver.
He spoke on the eve of the first anniversary of the provincial auditor general’s report on the eHealth debacle.
“People wonder if we’ll have electronic health records by 2015,” said Reed, referring to the digital records that contain a patient’s lab tests, diagnostic images and health history. “The reality is the province is awash with electronic health records.”
While the records in doctor’s offices and clinics won’t look the same across the province, they will all essentially perform the same function.
“I don’t care what kind of system a (health-care) professional is using but they have to have all the common specifications everyone else uses,” he said. “By doing it that way, we do it faster and much cheaper.”
eHealth has always aimed for the 2015 deadline, even before it was knocked off course last year.
Reed has a daunting challenge since the very mention of eHealth Ontario conjures up the scandal that gripped Queen’s Park for most of last year and resulted in the departure of several key players in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government.
Documents revealed eHealth awarded millions of dollars in sole-sourced contracts, executives were given perks and paid lucrative bonuses while consultants were paid nearly $3,000 a day. To the ire of taxpayers, some of those high-paid consultants expensed $1.65 cups of tea.
Those days are long gone, assured Reed, a Harvard University business school graduate with a background in resuscitating distressed companies.
“I am only looking forward, not behind,” the 56-year-old said with a smile. But he admits to reading all the eHealth Ontario stories when they dominated headlines last summer.
“My impression is this place has gone through a rough couple of years.”
Auditor General Jim McCarter released his report on the scandal on Oct. 7, 2009. The report criticized eHealth and its predecessor Smart Systems for Health Agency for lacking a strategic direction, hiring too many consultants and unwisely spending taxpayers’ money with little to show for it.
Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak crowed about the anniversary Tuesday in the Legislature.
“Premier, as you know, a year ago you forced the member for Don Valley East (David Caplan) to walk the plank to cover for George Smitherman and your own waste of $1 billion in the eHealth boondoggle,” said Hudak. A year later, ministry of health documents show $343 million has been spent recently by the agency.
“It took six years for the McGuinty Liberals to blow through the first billion of eHealth waste,” Hudak later told the Star. “They are on pace to blow $2 billion in three more years.”
While the media glare has subsided, the agency has made a series of quiet strides.
Notably, more than 5,300 doctors have been given funding to use electronic medical records — the personal health records kept in a doctor’s office — on their desktop computers. By 2012, eHealth projects 9,000 community physicians will have electronic medical records for 10 million of their patients.
eHealth is also set to invest in a new project called Connecting GTA that will link most Greater Toronto Area hospitals digitally by 2013 so they can share CT scans, lab results and a patient’s health history.
“Their objective would be to link 43 hospitals in the GTA but also all the community care clinics and family health teams — that is thousands of doctors,” Reed said. “At that point you’ve got 48 per cent of the population covered.”
A diabetes registry is also on the way — but in a different form than was once promised because “technology has marched on.”
“When this system was first conceived it was thought we could put up a website with secure access and doctors could go to the site and see the status of their patients,” he said.
But with doctors using their own version of electronic medical records and hospitals using their own system, that is not going to happen, he said.
Instead, lab results will be sent directly to physicians’ portals.
But consultants are still being used.
There are 118 consultants employed at the agency compared to a height of 385 previously.
“I am very happy at that level, it is healthy for an IT organization like this,” Reed said.
The main problem that eHealth faces now remains the same as before: its notoriety.
Most hospitals, doctors and health care workers have invested in electronic health but the systems don’t talk to each other. Bringing everyone up to the same standards is the key, Reed said.
“We need to agree on some common interfaces,” he said. “So there are standards of security, of access, how you map information fields and what I’d love to do and this would require collaboration around the province . . . let’s agree these are provincial standards.”
The scale of opportunity at eHealth is immeasurable, admitted Reed. “The scale of the challenges are immeasurable. It is a high wire, no net, high visibility and it’ll call on everything I’ve ever learned how to do,” he said.
“When I tell people what I’m doing at cocktail parties, their first question is, ‘Are you nuts?’” he laughed. “But I am coming to a deeper appreciation that this job is about improving the lives of 14 million people.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Tanya Talaga
Quelle/Source: The Toronto Star, 06.10.2010
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