But industry experts are not ready to celebrate yet.
They note that despite undeniable advances, resistance to digitized patient information still remains quite high among the province's healthcare practitioners.
Such resistance is one of the problems Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA) has had to overcome in its quest to deploy a province-wide e-health infrastructure.
This Agency of the Ontario Ministry of Health is now five years into its mandate.
So far SSHA has connected more than 5,000 locations to its ONE Network that enables healthcare providers to securely store, access and share patient data online, and collaborate with one another.
However, many physicians operating in individual offices remain hesitant to commit their records to the system.
On its part, the Agency has had its own issues.
It has been criticized for being behind schedule and being secretive, and brought in a new CEO to head its turnaround strategy.
Despite the difficulties they encounter, organizations such as the SSHA have a pivotal role to play as they herald the wave of the future, says Ross Armstrong, technology analyst at Info-Tech Research Group Inc. in London, Ont.
Online collaboration and sharing patient records and lab results delivers extraordinary benefits, says Armstrong, who has extensively researched electronic health systems in North America.
"If you can transmit x-ray images or lab results from one location to another that saves the patient from going through the same procedure again when he or she transfers to a different hospital."
And yet, though the benefits are evident, challenges to adoption remain, the analyst said.
He believes use of the technology might take off if hospitals start offering patients free access to their medical records.
Workplace culture and the cost of migrating existing data to digital format also impede widespread adoption, said Armstrong.
An SSHA executive agrees.
About 1,500 physicians or just eight per cent of the province's doctors are connected to the Agency's network, noted Paul Kilbertus, director of communications at SSHA.
He says technology issues and their perceived impact on business processes are holding back most doctors and smaller organizations from taking the plunge. "The products and services are free but individual technical issues can be a considerable problem."
For instance, he said, some health clinics may be tied to legacy systems that present compatibility problems or may have limited resources that prevent them from establishing and maintaining interfaces to the SSHA network.
Physicians are also considering whether moving over their records to the network makes good business sense, Kilbertus said.
"For doctors used to communicating by phone and transmitting medical records by fax, the question is what value [exists] in switching to digital."
Armstrong said some clinics are likely worried about the time and resources that would have to be expended in transferring hard copy patient files on to digital media and training staff in the use of new devices and business practices.
"This would mean a considerable downtime. Most clinics are too busy already and any minute away from the practice means money going out."
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Nestor E. Arellano
Quelle/Source: ITBusiness, 04.03.2008
