Although out-of-hospital records such as private lab test results and prescriptions are unavailable, Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) wants people to know an electronic patient information system is closer than most would think.
It is still in a rollout phase, but “we have 3,000 physicians and clinicians (out of 15,000) enrolled and we continue to add hospitals onto the system,” said Mark Farrow, HHS assistant vice-president of information and technologies. The Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant LHIN e-health version, spearheaded by HHS, will also tap into the Wellington Waterloo LHIN’s hospitals.
Provincially, Ontario’s e-Health Program will standardize and connect all such versions for provincewide access.
“With all the negative e-health information, the assumption was nothing was happening,” said Health Sciences president Murray Martin, in reference to the eHealth financial scandal last year over executive perks and lucrative bonuses and consultants that earned nearly $3,000 a day.
All electronic hospital records within the Local Health Integration Network can be accessed interhospital, except for Brant Community Healthcare and Grimsby’s West Lincoln. The accessible records for approved persons include hospital visits, treatments and procedures, tests and hospital lab results according to HHS officials. Access to individual doctors’ records will come in an unspecified future phase.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare vice-president of business Susan Hollis said not everything in hospitals is electronically available yet because “many notes are still on paper”.
Ontario’s Local Health Integration Networks are grouped into five regional areas with their own electronic patient record-sharing system, said eHealth chief executive officer Greg Reed.
EHealth’s role is to develop common standards to make them connected, and to form central registries of such information as inoculations given, he said.
“Think of it as a network of networks.” The job is not to build electronic records but to expand and connect existing ones – so a family doctor for example, can view radiology and lab results to become better informed about their patients, he said.
“The reality is the province is awash in electronic health records” — with 5,300 or 40 to 50 per cent of family doctors using electronic records, Reed said. The problem is the individual systems are not connected. “We’re not there yet.”
EHealth’s goal is to have all Ontarians’ medical files electronically available to all health care providers by 2015, a move expected to result in better care and considerable cost savings – for example, eliminating duplication of tests.
But University of Toronto associate professor Kevin Leonard believes a provincial system will be of little benefit without a ‘one patient, one record’ central depository. Data on individual patients now exists in different data bases and if this continues, Ontario will still suffer from a fragmented health care system with unsustainable costs, he said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Carmela Fragomeni
Quelle/Source: The Hamilton Spectator, 24.10.2010
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