Telus health space will provide patients and their families with access to their health information in an encrypted online environment, the company and a Toronto hospital said Monday.
The idea is to use Telus health space and its e-health record system, called My Chart, to securely move health information from home, the clinic, hospital or elsewhere to the consumer's fingertips.
“We’ve been recognized by groups like the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Wait Times Alliance as leaders in Canada in reducing surgical waits for key priority areas,” said Falcon. “The new wait times website will build on our success, giving patients more control over their surgical options by letting them see and compare surgery wait times from every hospital across British Columbia.”
Read more: Canada: British Columbia: Province introduces new surgical wait time website
But that’s no longer the case in the Orangeville area, where all but one member of the 25- member Dufferin Area Family Health Team has electronic records.
Typically, paper records, outlining your health history, will stay in a file folder at your doctor’s office, where they are inaccessible to any other medical professional who might be in need of the information contained in your file.
Read more: Canada: Ontario: Local doctors’ records now mainly electronic
There was a wait-list of 11 cases, as of Oct. 31, at Royal Columbian Hospital, according to a new website set up by the Ministry of Health.
Dr. Navraj Singh Heran is the surgeon at the hospital with the least amount of wait-listed cases, at five.
Royal Columbian Hospital had one of the shortest wait-lists in the Fraser Health region. Only Chilliwack General Hospital, at eight cases, and Delta Hospital, at five, were lower.
Read more: Canada: British Columbia: Check surgery wait times online
Physicians at one pioneering regional health center say they've used electronic medical records since 1997 and urge a national effort to do the same, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported Friday.
"When we started out we had paper charts and we longed for something more legible, more complete and more accessible, so computerization seemed like the way to go," said Dr. Lewis O'Brien, a family physician with the Group Health Center in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.