In 2009, eHealth funded eCare Kenora, a $339,000 initiative to connect three sites within the family health team and another between the Paterson Medical Centre and the laboratory at the hospital. While the family health team has been successful in establishing its network, the bridge between the doctors and the hospital is out.
In June 2009, a connection was established between the two organizations but programming complications with the family health team’s software caused the hospital to frequently have to reboot the system. Within a year, the hospital ceased supporting the initiative and there has been no connection since.
Repeated email correspondence with eHealth Ontario shows the organization believes the connection established in 2009 is still active, even though the managing North West Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) has no timeline for the connection coming back online.
“Our goal is to have that connection up and running,” said the LHIN’s manager of eHealth and acting chief information officer, Andrew Wehrestedt. “We want it done. Any of those integration projects we run into problems with, unfortunately, is due to interoperability problems.”
In 2011, another eHealth program worth $376,000 connected 12 hospitals, 25 health teams, and 168 physicians throughout the region in every community except Kenora. Wehrestedt confirmed “high level” discussions are underway to help find about $1 million to buy the hospital software called Meditech, which would make its electronic records compatible with the rest of the region.
“It’s something we’ve always been considering,” said hospital president, Mark Balcaen of the Meditech software. “Whenever we’ve looked at the software for the hospital, Meditech has tended to be on the expensive side of the other proponents we have. We’re waiting to see whether eHealth Ontario will help fund it.”
The family health team and the hospital have scheduled a meeting for next week to revive the issue, based on the health team recently having hired an information technology coordinator and completed a total overhaul of its software.
The team sees success in the “90 per cent” of the eCare Kenora program that is running, having aligned its three different software programs into a system that allows doctors to retrieve information at all three sites and remotely from home. Administrator Randy Belair said he hopes to launch an interactive website shortly and is hopeful connections with the hospital will come to fruition with new software updates.
“We thought we had it up and running last fall but there was a problem with the code in it,” he said. “The status now is P and P (software) is going to be implementing an update for us and we’re told the Omnitech interface is part of that update. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it’s going to work.”
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Jon Thompson
Quelle/Source: Daily Miner and News, 14.03.2012
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
