A practical guide for Ontario family doctors and clinic teams Let’s be real: most of us didn’t go into medicine thinking we’d have to become IT security experts. We’re running busy primary care practices, juggling patients, staffing, billing, and paperwork—cybersecurity feels like something for hospitals or banks to worry about. But here’s the truth: community clinics…
In today’s digitized healthcare landscape, primary care physicians are unwittingly standing at the edge of a cybersecurity cliff—and many don’t realize it. For most community doctors, cybersecurity barely registers in the long list of their daily demands. Yet the risks are growing, the stakes are high, and the solutions—while complex—are within reach if we take…
Today, healthcare faces a crucial challenge: leveraging clinical decision support (CDS) tools to make smarter, more efficient healthcare referrals. Speaking at the Canadian Association of Radiologists’ (CAR) Conference on Digitizing Healthcare Referrals, I shared thoughts on integrating CDS into healthcare systems and how we can make these tools more practical for clinicians and valuable for…
Together with Anthony Divalentino, the talented and exceptionally bright Executive Director of the Central Brampton Family Health Team, we are bringing forth a three-part series on implementing technology in community practices. We hope this will combine the experiences of both the clinical and administrative sides of care, talking about the issues and helping solve problems…
Change is happening now in Ontario healthcare. It has been needed for some time, but a new provincial government with a demand to deliver high value for public dollars is making the change imminent. So what, exactly, is “value”? Value is best defined as quality (in all of its domains) divided by cost. It can be measured from…
Despite the obvious advantages to both patients and providers of using virtual care tools, they have had very little uptake in the average community practice. There are many reasons for this hovering in the background, from payment models to variable high speed internet access, but the most important of these has to do with office…
We have come a long way in Canada in getting physicians to adopt digital records systems in the form of office based electronic medical records (EMRs). In Ontario alone over 11,600 physicians (both family doctors and specialists) have EMRs in their practices and are using them with varying levels of sophistication. For many of us,…
