Let's continue our discourse around Dr. J's “must-haves”, with the second item, a SaaS or web-based EMR system.
As a bit of a backgrounder, we'll travel back in time to her university days – you see, web-based E-mail was unavailable and the only way to get access during her travels, was to dial-up the school's facilities; this more often than not turned out to be prohibitively expensive.
I'm sure you can imagine her parents' delight when Hotmail was introduced – no more phone cards or long distance charges to be concerned with – no more “sorry, the mail service is currently unavailable due to maintenance” messages for Dr. J; now, all she had to do was find an Internet-enabled computer system to reliably keep in touch with friends and family.
Fast forward to the year 2010; Dr. J has a thriving paper-based neurosurgery practice in Ontario, Canada, and is actively investigating the implementation of an EMR system to more efficiently serve her patients.
She's sat through numerous meetings with the governing body for her practice, faithfully attended the annual AAN conferences, and had passionate discussions with her peers; at almost all of these events, EMR systems was one of the hot button topics.
However, what she's found so far in her research, has not been encouraging – not that there's anything inherently flawed with the functionality of the current recommendations from OntarioMD; basically she'd rather not be tethered to any of them.
Changing to EMR technology is disruptive enough without the added responsibility for system troubleshooting, data security, privacy issues, maintenance and the like; sure, she realizes she can hire someone, but what Dr. J would really love to see is something similar to web mail whereby she can sit next to any of her patients anywhere (be it at her practice, hospital bedside etc.) with her iPad and discuss their case via a browser-based application.
Dr. J currently outsources the maintenance of her vehicle, her financial record-keeping, building maintenance and security, web mail etc. – what makes an EMR application any different? In fact, why can't she just outsource it to her LHIN organization?
She realizes that healthcare in this province is moving to the stage whereby health providers will be held to a standard of “results-based” care; being distracted by the complexity of maintaining Information Technology systems or any other tool in her healthcare toolbox for that matter, is no longer an option – applying all her efforts (to keeping current with the latest developments in her field and helping her patients stay healthy with tools such as the TELUS PHR offering), is.
Next time we'll discuss the third and final point, namely the way patient data is managed in Ontario – let's see if we can put Dr. J's ideas together into one cohesive plan from a ten thousand-foot level perspective.
