- 3/26/2012
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has just come out with a study indicating that wait times for essential hospital procedures held steady in 2011. The numbers actually aren’t that bad, but it appears that the last few miles are hard to cover. One challenge is that the number of procedures is increasing.
- 3/19/2012
Last week, when the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on a study suggesting that Canadian hospitals may be getting better results for each dollar spent than their U.S. counterparts, the media had something of a heyday.
- 3/12/2012
It's a curiosity of corporate culture that it promotes two social values that appear to be at odds with each other: teamwork and leadership. Not everyone can be a leader, yet leadership is promoted as a value we all should possess. At the same time, we're supposed to work collectively, which means we should know when to defer to others.
- 3/5/2012
A paper that was just released at the Toronto Board of Trade says that by embedding and implementing “Privacy by Design”, or PbD, into electronic health records, Canadians are set to have the best of both worlds: full access to health information while also having their privacy protected.
- 2/27/2012
Whether fair or not, doctors have a reputation for having hard-to-read handwriting. One of the presumed benefits of electronic records is that pharmacists, nurses and other caregivers will no longer have to decipher a doctor’s illegible scrawl. The added benefit of a digital system would then be fewer mistakes.
- 2/20/2012
Device hitting the wall in the high-demand world of today’s health care.
- 2/6/2012
The federal government recently announced $67.5 million in joint funding for research into personalized medicine. This led to some confusion, as personalized means different things to different people: it could refer to personal health records, wellness programs or medical research focussed on individual genetics.
- 1/30/2012
And, if we agree that electronic records are going to be the backbone of Canada’s healthcare system in the 21st century, then it is incumbent on all stakeholders to lead discussions of new technologies with an assurance that privacy concerns are front-of-mind.
- 1/25/2012
When it comes to healthcare information portals, we already live in a multiverse, and it is expanding. That’s not necessarily bad news, but it does force us to ask ourselves how the multi-portal reality will be managed in the future.
- 1/16/2012
Speech recognition has come a long way and the technology now works quite well. And it's a good thing—as we all know humans will waste a lot of time trying to de-bug a computer, but they don’t much like repeating themselves when speaking to a machine.
- 1/9/2012
There was a lot of buzz last year about The Ottawa Hospital’s (TOH’s) decision to go with iPads. By mid-2011 TOH had almost 1,800 iPads across its three campuses. This came off of a successful pilot program with a mobile EMR application.
- 1/3/2012
The news out of Alberta is worrying, with errors in the interpretation of diagnostic imaging and pathology tests discovered in three different cities in less than two months.
