By: Sarah Hutchison, CEO, OntarioMD
When the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020, Ontario's health care system delivery partners were able to deploy digital solutions to health care as care shifted to virtual encounters and physical distancing requirements required new ways to interact with patients.
Digital platforms and tools have been playing an increasingly significant role in connecting and integrating hospitals, systems, people and health information. Ontario continues to advance its leadership in the digital transformation of health care in this province and other jurisdictions.
But while thousands of Ontario physicians had already been benefiting from digital tools, the pandemic provided sobering projections of the impact of not taking resolute and decisive action when a system may be under strain. As part of the pandemic response, OntarioMD worked with government and vendor partners to adapt the Health Report Manager (HRM) digital platform so that hospitals could provide COVID-19 test results and patient engagements with the virus to family physicians in real-time.
HRM is now connected to the province's Ontario Laboratories Information System (OLIS), providing community-based physicians and nurse practitioners with almost instantaneous access to information about patients who have contracted the virus and require follow up.
Now, as COVID-19 results become available, clinicians are prompted by a notification to check OLIS through an EMR-integrated patient query. Clinicians will know the results at the same time, or sooner, as patients who are checking for their results online or who were contacted by a COVID-19 assessment centre. They can then connect with the patient to monitor them, if necessary.
The notifications to HRM also now include results in OLIS for lab tests ordered from pharmacies.
It's crucial that technology continues to evolve and adapt in this way in order to find new and innovative ways to strengthen the connection between hospitals and family doctors. The goal must always be to have a full suite of digital solutions so that all of the essential components of patient care can come together to integrate our increasingly complex health care system.
The information flow between hospitals and other health care provider sites, and clinicians, enabled by HRMs is already extensive:
- Patient information is delivered from more than 500 hospitals and speciality clinic sites into EMRs,
- More than 11,000 clinicians across the province are connected to hospitals through EMRs,
- More than 80 million reports have been digitally delivered through HRM, and
- More than 2.5 million reports are delivered every month through HRM.
OntarioMD has been working with community-based physicians and nurse practitioners and their practice staff for the past 15 years to equip them with digital health tools to enhance the excellent patient care they provide and help them improve practice efficiency.
Other tools include the Insights4Care Dashboard, eConsult and the ConnectingOntario ClinicalViewer, demand for which also began to surge as clinicians realized that these tools would be useful during the pandemic, and into the future. Clinicians are also completing OntarioMD's free online privacy and security training to understand the best practices to protect patient health information when using digital tools.
Digital tools are helping keep down the cost of health care delivery in Ontario. Just by eliminating paper reports through the HRM, $45 million in cost avoidance is realized in the province each year. That cost avoidance is appreciated by hospitals as they cope with increased demand and generate more reports.
New digital practices and technologies that deliver simpler, faster, better services to Ontarians is part of a 14-point Digital Service Standard that came into effect in Ontario in August 2019. This fall, the province said the fight against COVID-19 had accelerated the government's progress in finding digital solutions to make government services more accessible, including digital health solutions for frontline care personnel so that they can rapidly and securely access a patient's health record from anywhere and from any device.
"The world has changed and government must change with it," Peter Bethlenfalvy, President of the Treasury Board and Chair of the Future State Modernization Committee, said in a media release.
More clinicians are expected to use HRM as they join Ontario Health Teams (OHTs), which are implementing digital health tools aligned with requirements and policy direction outlined in Ontario's Digital Health Playbook. HRM's proven flexibility and the scalability to deliver many types of reports with accurate and up-to-date information is one way to integrate the health care system to improve patient outcomes.
Many more integration solutions will emerge, as our innovators unleash the power of technology to drive the future of health care.
To find out more about HRM, and OntarioMD's full suite of digital tools, visit OntarioMD's website at www.ontariomd.ca, or contact us at support@ontariomd.com.