The Infoway Vision
Meet Josette. She has diabetes and several complications related to her disease. However, thanks to a team of health care providers working in partnership with her, Josette gets excellent care and support despite living in a small rural community.
At home, Josette takes her blood sugar readings. She then logs on to her local diabetes care portal and enters the readings, thus making them accessible to her health care team. The diabetes portal is also used by the team to send Josette reminders of treatments and upcoming appointments.
In the coming years, new consumer health solutions like the one Josette uses, will offer more Canadians the opportunity to become more involved in their own health care. Where once you could only gain access to your health information during a face-to-face visit with a health care provider, new technology will provide the tools you need to access your electronic health record anywhere, anytime, as easily as you might check your bank transactions online.
Imagine getting an e-mail reminder that it’s time to refill a prescription.
Imagine getting an alert on your cell phone of a public-health outbreak in your community.
Imagine conducting your own blood pressure and heart rate checks and sending the information to your health care provider via a secure patient monitoring system in your own home.
Welcome to Infoway's vision for the future of health care in Canada.
The Infoway vision for health care centres on the development of electronic health record (EHR) systems to provide health care from teams of clinicians sharing information, often over great distances, and working with one another and the patient to ensure the best-possible health care.
The creation of a pan-Canadian EHR network will bring Canada's paper-based health care system into the 21st century. And that will give clinicians the information they need, quickly and accurately, to enable them to make better-informed decisions about patient diagnosis and treatment. And it will give Canadians the information they need to lead healthier lives.
Specifically this entails:
- Patient-centred care, which means patients and their caregivers share information and work together to make the best-possible patient-care decisions;
- Collaborative teams, which means a team of caregivers from different disciplines – doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others – collaborate to provide the best possible patient care;
- Evidence-based care, which means caregivers make decisions based on current, relevant case studies and evidence gathered from experts around the world to provide the best possible patient care;
- Redesigned business processes, which bring new ways of gathering and sharing information to support evidence-based, collaborative care; to ensure the best possible patient outcomes;
- Relevant data capture and analysis, which is becoming available through a pan-Canadian EHR network built on secure databases, making it easier to collect and analyze health information to ensure the best possible patient outcomes;
- Timely feedback and education, which is conveyed to caregivers by an EHR network and which results in better informed, more accessible and more efficient treatment to ensure the best possible patient outcomes.
What EHRs will not do is replace visits to a doctor’s office, hospital or laboratory. However, these tools will give health care providers better access to patient information and that will enable them to:
- Devote more valuable time to their patients;
- Improve the quality and safety of patient care;
- Deliver more efficient care, leading to shorter wait times, better outcomes, and lower health-care costs.
Learn more about the future of Canada’s health system in Infoway’s Corporate Business Plan for 2009-2010 or read about Canada's EHR progress.