Photo courtesy freeimages.com/Kurhan
Hospitals in northwestern Ontario are moving a to digital world.
Ontario MD has worked with twelve hospitals in northwestern Ontario, including Riverside Health Care Facilities and Atikokan General Hospital, to include them as part of a digital report system known as Health Report Manager which is already in place elsewhere in southern Ontario.
Vice-president Elizabeth Keller says it will improve on patient care.
“The biggest benefit is clinicians and physicians really are expecting and needing all of this real-time health information as soon as possible so that they can make the best decision for your care,” says Keller.
Keller says no matter where a patient is in Ontario, their doctor is now in a position to access their records at any time. She says they’re also looking at possible expansion that would benefit northwestern Ontario patients.
“The exciting part now is we’re actually thinking about how we can even expand it perhaps even over the Manitoba border so that patients that are being serviced in Manitoba and Winnipeg we will now be able to potentially get their hospital records back electronically instantaneously as well,” says Kellar.
With the addition of the hospitals that make up the North West Hospital Alliance, OntarioMD says it will add more than 1.8 million reports available to 10,000 clinicians across the province.
It says the system saved $36 million to the health care system while saving up to a half hour of practice time per clinician every day accessing the information.
