Eager to counter two years of bad publicity over a multimillion-dollar spending scandal, Ontario's health minister boasted Tuesday that the province's overhauled electronic-health records program had managed to get five million patients on to digital medical charts.
Critics say Ontario, the federal government and other provinces, however, are still squandering billions by relying on expensive commercial software to implement electronic health records, rather than free, open-source programs that are proving effective and much less costly.
Deb Matthews, the Health Minister, told a news conference there are now 5,500 doctors using electronic records in her province, which she said was almost double the number a year ago and the most of any Canadian jurisdiction.
Computerized medical charts are considered a crucial goal for the health-care system, with experts predicting they will reduce costs, curb medical error and boost efficiency, but Canada has been slow to implement the concept, despite billions being spent on it.
Speaking at a downtown Toronto clinic that went electronic five years ago, Matthews said her province aims to have everyone on electronic-health records by 2015.
"It means quicker results, it means less time travelling, it means better care," she said. "We are on track, delivering results."
The process of implementing EMR has been overseen by the province's eHealth Ontario agency, still synonymous for many with the biggest financial scandal of the Ontario Liberals' tenure, leading to the resignations last year of both the organization's CEO and David Caplan, health minister at the time.
The provincial auditor general highlighted excessive spending, especially for generous, untendered contracts with outside consultants, who at times outnumbered eHealth employees.
New outsourcing rules and other controls have since been implemented, and Matthews argued there is much now to counter the lingering image of waste around the agency.
About 34 per cent of physicians who could use electronic records have now adopted them, benefitting from a subsidy of $28,000 each from the province, totalling about $154 million.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Tom Blackwell
Quelle/Source: Ottawa Citizen, 03.11.2010
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