Digital Health News

The eHealth Centre of Excellence (eCE) is delighted to announce that we are hosting our 3rd annual Partnerships in eHealth symposium, on May 17.

You can RSVP directly on our EventBrite page. We hope you will consider this an opportunity to share your ideas and help shape the future of healthcare in Ontario — your feedback matters, and we are listening.

For example, last year’s event theme was Patient Engagement and the afternoon portion of the day had attendees participating in discussions concerning the challenges of engaging patients and their caregivers to better manage their own health care through the use of digital technologies.

These discussions revealed several themes that would need to be addressed:

• Engagement & Knowledge — Technology should be used in ways that include patients: building knowledge will empower them to get involved, and easier access to information will enable them to make better-informed decisions

• Receptivity — Don’t develop digital tools for the sake of it, but assess and then demonstrate what is needed and why

• User Experience — Both patients and clinicians need to be involved in the design of technology solutions, to ensure that these solutions make sense for the people who will actually be using them 

• Fragmentation — Neither patients nor their clinicians will want to use several applications and logins to access different pieces of information about their health contained on different information systems

Taking into account the themes raised during these breakout sessions, we purposefully built guiding principles into the eCE’s System Coordinated Access (SCA) program, which is supporting the deployment of an electronic referral (eReferral) system for the Waterloo Wellington region. Thanks in large part to the feedback gathered during last year’s event, the SCA program has since:

• Established the SCA Program Patient & Caregiver Advisory Committee, and added patient/caregiver representatives as members to the SCA Program Steering Committee and SCA Proof of Concept Implementation Steering Committee

• Built a system design and deployment model that is founded around patient and clinician feedback (test, feedback, enhance, repeat)

• Recruited clinicians to give continuous feedback on the eReferral design process – both referrers (primary care) and receivers (specialists/programs)

• Developed 4 benefits realization cases to demonstrate the improved organizational and clinical value that come with the introduction of new referral processes

• Selected a vendor and eReferral solution with an open architecture that can integrate with electronic medical records (EMRs) and other necessary assets to support a seamless user experience

The theme for this year’s event is Transformational Change, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what ideas you will bring to the table — collaboration is among our core values, and we will continue to work with patients and healthcare providers across the continuum of care to improve the use of information technologies in the delivery of healthcare. 

A photo from our first event.