EHealth officials were in Thunder Bay last Friday to make the $376,000 announcement to network 12 hospitals, 25 health teams, and 168 physicians but due to incompatible information technology systems, the Lake of the Woods District Hospital and the Sunset Country Family Health Team are the only organizations not participating.
The rest of the region operates on a system called Meditech, which the local hospital investigated and found prohibitively expensive, as a new IT systems must be bought with operating budget funds. The Meditech software is incompatible with the system used locally.
As far back as 2005, the North East Local Health Integration Network looked to the Northwest as a model for electronic health record sharing. Noting the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences/St. Joseph's Care Group Meditech system was leading the region to a common and compatible platform, it pointed out: "Northwestern Ontario has developed a regional common (Picture Archiving Computer Systems) platform and the collaborative management of medical images the region. The majority (of) hospitals use a common solution. The region is well underway to providing access to an integrated view of diagnostic imaging information — the image, diagnostic interpretation, and other pertinent information required to provide patient care."
Kenora is far from left out in the cold, however. In 2009, eHealth Ontario invested $339,000 in a similar integration between the hospital and Sunset Family Health Team electronic medical records. That expenditure represents 90 per cent of the cost of networking the remainder of the region. Representatives of eHealth refused to comment on the efficiency of the expenditure.
The eCare Kenora pilot project, which North West LHIN chief information officer and eHealth lead Brian Ktytor called "above and beyond" the communication that is being constructed through the rest of the region, includes eDocumentation, eCollaboration and eRemote services.
Where eDocumentation securely shares diagnostic imaging, physiotherapy, hospital lab or discharge reports, eCollaboration networks physicians, specialists, dieticians, nurse practitioners, chiropodists, physiotherapists, hospital departments and community-based health organizations with a secure portal for communication, referrals and the tracking and patient booking. ERemote allows staff to securely access the patient's records from home, the hospital and between sites.
"There's not much in ways of referrals from our hospital to the rest of the region and there are very few referrals from the major areas to the doctor's offices in our community," hospital president Mark Balcaen said, adding it would require "multiple millions of dollars" from the hospital's roughly $40-million operating budget to purchase the Meditech system and align with the region's norm. "I think our community hasn't done too badly. Our community is working toward a shared electronic record and we're not complaining about where things are at. We're moving along."
North West Local Health Integration Network chief executive officer Laura Kokocinski said the Kenora project laid the groundwork for the broader regional project and standards of connectivity between the hospitals and doctors are most critical.
"(Kenora) really helped in order to move the physician office integration project forward," she said. "It's about having a standard across the province and ECare Kenora is meeting the standard. Back in 2008 when they were looking at doing all of this, (Kenora) was an early example of integration. The technology was different then, the costs were higher for technology than they are today and the capacity of people, whether it's the technicians or the designers, has certainly grown through the learnings of these early pilot projects."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Jon Thompson
Quelle/Source: Kenora Daily Miner and New, 14.01.2011
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