A new CMAJ study by Kappanam et al maps Canada’s health data interoperability landscape province by province, and their heat map tells a story worth sitting with. The provinces that score best share three things: small populations, a single EMR adopted — or at least designated — province-wide, and a unified Hospital Information System. Prince…
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…
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…
We have talked a lot about the issues surrounding AI in our medical practices, but now it’s time to think about tools we can use to improve our work lives. Several types of AI applications have the potential to be integrated into office settings now or very soon, offering benefits to both healthcare providers and…
Last month I was honoured to be part of a panel on the state of Digital Health in Primary Care, at the Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto. The panel discussion with three other esteemed colleagues (Sonya Lockyer – Lifemark; Dov Klein – Ontario Health; Zayna Kayat – Deloitte/Teledoc) centred around digital health processes…
credit: @gapingvoid.com Welcome to the third part of this four-part series on the evolving landscape of Primary healthcare in…
This is the second post in a four-part series on my blog, about current trends in Primary Care in Canada. These trends are not all encompassing, but I think they serve as a great starting point for discussion around what is needed to properly transform health care delivery in the community, making Family Medicine a…
In recent years, primary care in Canada has undergone significant transformations, largely driven by changing patient expectations and the evolving healthcare landscape. Covid-19 certainly shifted our focus, both looking very sharply at needs at sub local levels, but also at broader system change that is required to keep our population healthy. From the patient perspective,…
This article was originally posted on OntarioMD.blog With fairly radical transformation happening in health care in Ontario as we speak, a question looms large: how do we measure success? How do we know that the change we get is what we need? Which lens do we look through as success will appear differently for patients,…
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…
