Digital Health News

This past month, the eHealth Centre of Excellence (eCE) was delighted to be hosting our 3rd annual “Partnerships in eHealth” symposium, with this year’s theme focusing on Transformational Change.

To kick things off, attendees heard some fascinating keynote addresses from three speakers. First, Deputy Minister of Health and Long-Term Care Dr. Bob Bell provided an update on "Patients First", a comprehensive, ambitious and transformative strategy for healthcare in Ontario. During his talk, Dr. Bell noted that the adoption of digital health tools that enhance clinical workflows is part of Patients First’s commitment to provide Ontarians with better and faster access to high quality, integrated health services, and the eCE is proud to be supporting this initiative.

Huda Idrees, CEO of Dot Health, was next to speak, and her talk focused on turning the healthcare system on its head, creating a bottom-up economy by using technology to give patients access to their own information – empowering them to improve their health and keeping them out of hospitals and at home, where they want to be. 

In his speech, Chief Bryan Larkin, Waterloo Regional Police Service, spoke about opportunities for collaboration and integration between sectors. He suggested that we start shifting traditional job roles in innovative new ways that better suit the needs of the residents living in our community – or in other words, we should start taking a look at the "unusual suspects" to drive change.

For the second portion of the event, attendees broke into three groups to discuss the past, present, and future state of healthcare with sessions moderated by:

• Dr. Upe Mehan, Family Doctor at the Centre for Family Medicine Family Heath Team
• Ted Alexander, Manager of Benefits Realization for the connecting South West Ontario (cSWO) Program
• Krizia Francisco, Portfolio Manager, Digital Health & Innovation for the ‎Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network (WWLHIN)

We are collecting notes from these breakout sessions to help us inform the work we’re doing here at the eCE. Click here to read about how your input from last year’s event influenced the development of our System Coordinated Access (SCA) program.

Overall, it was an invigorating, engaging and collaborative day – and we’re already excited to do it all again next year! Thank you to everyone who took part, and watch this space for more updates.