ARTICLES BY THIS AUTHOR
- 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. - 9/9/2012
Medical technologies and Canada’s regulatory advantage
One of the challenges with bringing new medical technologies to market is the long timeline. There are many reasons for this, but the most pervasive is the regulatory environment. A young company can’t just go to market with a medical device in the same way that a tech startup can roll out a gaming app for an iPhone. - 9/2/2012
Lean tech vs. bloated tech
In the manufacturing sector, a “lean” approach is now understood to be the de facto way to conduct operations. The approach is inherently business-focussed: it is all about what is of value to a customer, with the assumption being that that customer is a paying one. - 8/26/2012
Canadian money can take healthcare technology global
There has been a lot of talk of late about how Canada is well-positioned to have a world-class medical technology industry. After all, we have all the requirements: a solid academic and teaching-hospital community, a growing investor class, and governments at both the federal and provincial level that are eager to jump-start the industry.