There has been a whirlwind of activity here at TELUS health solutions this past week. We revealed a couple of big announcements at the eHealth 2011 Conference in Toronto last week, and wanted to share some of the great initiatives we’re been working on.
For starters, we introduced the TELUS Personal Health Record (PHR) to help Canadians better manage their health and simplify the exchange of information between health professionals and consumers. A Canadian first, the new PHR will link to doctors’ electronic medical record solutions through TELUS health space allowing consumers to view the health information transferred by their healthcare professionals into their PHR in a user friendly interface, securely accessible online.
We also announced a partnership with Carefx to create a unique set of services for clinicians and providers to access through a private cloud. TELUS CareShare will give clinicians choice, allowing them to subscribe and pay for only the service or information they require for improved clinical management and patient services.
Another big announcement: Dr. Michael Guerriere was appointed Chief Medical Officer for TELUS Health Solutions – our first CMO to date. Dr. Guerriere has worked with leading health care organizations on information management, clinical change, quality improvement and health care operations management initiatives, and will work with clinical professionals to incorporate powerful new tools making their way into clinical practice.
Check out my interview with Michael, who weighs in on TELUS’s new PHR application, his new role as Chief Medical Officer, and how TELUS is working to start a dialogue of how technology will change the health landscape.
In early January, the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow – CES—showcased an abundance of cool tech gadgets, products, and innovation in the works for 2011. One series of apps that stood out the most is the Fitness TechZone featured apps and hardware that touched on themes of mobile monitoring for healthcare, which got me thinking about what the top tech trends for ehealth will be in 2011.More...
A report issued today (September 27th, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/watchdog-issues-urgent-call-for-electronic-health-records/article1727204/ ) by the Health Council of Canada, an independent body created by federal and provincial governments to monitor the health system, predicts that “if Canada continues to delay implementation of electronic health records and doesn’t do more to support family doctors, the problems of inappropriate prescribing and excessive medical testing will dramatically worsen as the population ages.”
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Ok. I admit it. I’m scared. But not because we’re facing a huge challenge in our healthcare system – we’ve seen this coming for years. No, I’m scared because we’re looking for scapegoats. Hopefully we begin to see a rapid change in both Canadians' mentality towards heathcare and in our practice of it.
Recent health headlines such as: Most Canadians fear for health system: report card, Canadians brace for higher health costs: poll and Survey finds most fear boomers will cripple health-care system scream warnings about Canadian’s fear that boomers will cripple our healthcare system over the next several years; and because aging seniors cannot afford care the result will be a toxic increase in tax hikes that our younger generations will have to endure. More...
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On June 23rd the Commonwealth Fund issued a report that compared the healthcare systems of seven western countries based on data from patients&r
squo; and physicians’ survey results on care experiences and ratings on various dimensions of care.
The seven nations studied were Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Here’s what they found:
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