INSITE Knowledge.
November 2010
Almost 5500 doctors now using eHealth .... BUT!
By Maria Babbage, The Canadian Press
TORONTO - Almost 5,500 doctors treating more than five million people in Ontario are now using electronic medical records, but many still can't communicate with each other, eHealth CEO Greg Reed said.
To improve adoption by physicians, each doctor who switches to an EMR receives $28,000 over 3 years from the Ontario government.
On the same topic but with emphasis and criticism of Canada Health Infoway, Dr Mark Dermer writes in Healthcare IMC Nov 2010. Vol 24.No 3
.... "An electronic health record system with access for everyone - family physicians, consultants, pharmacists, hospitalists, managers and researchers - will save lives and improve health outcomes."
The author presents three answers (in his opinion) in response to the rhetorical question, "why is adoption by physicians so slow?"
1. The cost to physicians
2 Insufficiencies in the available electronic record offerings
3. Poor leadership from jurisdictions and Infoway
This paper appears to have a focus on correcting and criticizing statements, assumptions and the performance claims of Infoway. However, we suggest the article has much more value than that. It presents an excellent view of the value proposition to physicians. We (INSITE Consultancy) suggest that the combined efforts of Infoway, jurisdictions, health authorities and physicians have, collectively, faired poorly in their engagement and collaboration with the physician community in a comprehensive and meaningful way. Yes, the lessons learned and responsibility must be shared if the solution is to meet the needs of those we hope to see adopt it.
November 2010
Video Conferencing Technology in Healthcare fills a gap, satisfies a need but not quite as good as old fashioned face to face meetings:
This research showed that conferencing technologies can impact social interactions within knowledge exchange groups. For example, when the group is geographically dispersed and there is a limited budget to support travel, the group is more likely to rely on conferencing technologies to support group social interactions. As the group starts to use these technologies, they begin to adapt to them and use them in a way that makes sense to the group. The use of technology, over time, was demonstrated to lead to changes in social interaction norms, such as introducing communication checks at the beginning of meetings, and leading to the migration from the use of one technology (teleconferencing) to another (web-conferencing). When the group (i.e., the researcher task group) was collaborative, co-located, and had a budget to support travel, face-to-face interactions were the preferred method. Furthermore, when the group was non-collaborative and geographically dispersed, such as the decision-making task group, the use of teleconferencing to support social interactions was sufficient for the group.
In British Columbia, Fraser Health has installed high-end video conferencing technology in it's new, modern outpatient and surgery facility. The technology is expected to bridge the communication challenges between healthcare professionals working in a multidisciplinary team and across dispersed geography
November 2010On-Line Booking: Patients adopt EMR-based system in
Alberta and the NHS's "Choose and Book" system has set the stage
Is it really that hard to develop an on-line booking system? A busy primary care practice in Sherwood, Alberta doesn't think so. What lessons can large Health Authorities learn from the little guys?
The study focuses on a solo physician practicing for almost 30 years in Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada, a community of 60,000 residents. The busy physician office has 2.5 full-time support staff equivalents (FTEs), five examination rooms and a patient panel size of 2,993 patients. The physician had been using an EMR system for almost 10 years. The practice receives 60 to 90 calls per day for appointments. In the summer of 2008, the physician decided to pilot an online booking system. The vendor hosted, self-service system uses a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel to send plain HTML GET and POST methods over TCP/IP. The vendor hosted site retrieves patient and schedule data from the physician office hosted, EMR scheduling module for presentation to the patient. The system is integrated with the physician's EMR so that patient bookings are automatically inserted in the EMR's schedule. Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of the online booking system.
D.A. Ludwick, PEng., MBA, PMP, is from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, and General Manager of Sherwood Park - Strathcona County Primary Care Network, Sherwood Park,