ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR
- 12/3/2012
Healthcare software companies face consolidation
Large-scale foreign purchases of Canadian companies have been in the news of late. With healthcare technology companies, however, the deals are much smaller and fly under the radar. - 11/25/2012
Canada’s healthcare technology innovators wave the flag
I have written on how important it is for healthcare innovators in Canada – and particularly those who are looking to gain big market share with EMRs and physical devices – to have a strategy for entrance into global markets. - 11/18/2012
Sometimes, home technology needs an assist
If Canada is going to create a stable, affordable healthcare system, one thing is certain: we have to have reliable medical technologies on the home front. This is because the maintenance of chronic conditions, a big part of tomorrow’s healthcare budget, will be dependent on home monitoring. - 11/11/2012
Future-proofing your EMR
Electronic medical records are, in theory, pretty straightforward: they simply offer doctors an electronic alternative to traditional paper-based records systems. - 11/4/2012
Give technology its due in controlling hospital costs
It was big news: the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) said recently that healthcare spending growth is expected to slow in 2012, part of a multi-year trend. But in many respects the details left little to cheer about, because, according to CIHI, this easing was mainly a reflection of tight budgets and macroeconomic weakness. - 10/28/2012
Note to Conference Board: Canada is not Denmark
The Conference Board of Canada recently came out with the results of a new study commissioned by Canada Health Infoway. In it, the Board concludes that Canadian patients 18 and older could avoid almost 47 million in-person visits to healthcare providers annually if three main healthcare activities were online: choice of consulting with providers, access to test results, and prescription renewal. - 10/21/2012
Need a good habit? PHRs can help reduce 'sickcare'
We are being told that Canada is on the verge of an obesity crisis, which in turn will increase rates for related conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. To solve this problem, policy-makers and physicians agree that the first line of defence is lifestyle modification. - 10/14/2012
The pain points of legacy technology
When computer geeks refer to legacy technology, they usually mean old back-office hardware and software that is hard to integrate and slows things down. Often, in the parlance of IT business professionals, these are referred to as “pain points.” - 9/30/2012
TELUSHealth.com and the many faces of convergence
To date Telus claims to have put more than $1 billion into this multi-faceted, converged approach to healthcare information. The company is promoting its converged approach by giving it a nationalist bent, saying that TELUSHealth.com “also improves the health of Canadians and the effectiveness of the country’s healthcare system as a whole.” It might be premature to assert that having information delivered this way will necessarily result in better health outcomes, though it certainly makes intuitive sense. - 9/23/2012
Life sciences tech: spending money to save money
As life sciences technologies advance, the Canadian healthcare system finds itself in the midst of some contradictory – though not necessarily competing – trends in pharmacology. - 9/16/2012
Agfa/Orion sale to Alberta will boost province's health technology
Alberta’s biotech sector has been struggling of late, and it isn’t only because it has to share the limelight with flashier stories out of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.