- 7/11/2011
The news that Canada Health Infoway has established an Emerging Technology Group to “identify and guide the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in health care” is welcome.
- 7/4/2011
In response to a recent blog post of mine that discussed various strategies for increasing EMR adoption, a physician commented that forcing doctors to use EMRs would be “a total failure” and “looked upon by future generations as a major tactical mess.”
- 6/27/2011
Google has announced that Google Health will be discontinued as a service after January 1, 2012, because it “didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped.”
- 6/20/2011
When it comes to technology adoption to advance mobile health, we often forget that, much as in the technology wars in the past, business acumen on the part of senior management, a robust distribution channel and early-mover status can be as advantageous as the technology itself.
- 6/13/2011
A recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal quoted Tom Closson, president and CEO of the Ontario Hospital Association, as saying it was an "unfair and inappropriate use of public money" to pay physicians who do not use electronic medical records.
- 6/6/2011
At last week's e-Health 2011 Conference in Toronto I was introduced to the Telus Personal Health Record (PHR). It's not news that this has been in the works. For some time now Telus has let the market know that it's developing its Health Space, which is based on Microsoft’s HealthVault technology.
- 5/30/2011
The recent news out of Canada Health Infoway that telehealth use in Canada is growing by more than 35% annually made great headlines, and there was a lot of good news within the study. However, there was also a lack of clarity as to how efficacious specific systems were, and a hidden story with regard to the social and health challenges in Canada’s north.
- 5/24/2011
As technology eHealth infrastructure settles in for the long haul – meaning interoperable EHRs, solid networks on the ground, and access to private clouds – it will be time for the “air war.”
- 5/16/2011
Medical device licensing rightly focuses on the viability – and safety – of a technology from a medical perspective. But the criteria often don’t include a vision of how technology will fit into larger, connected networks, or support electronic health records.
- 5/9/2011
The Canada Health Act, the document that underpins Canada’s public healthcare system, remains popular. However, few Canadians are willing to admit that the Act’s main tenets – namely public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability and accessibility – have never been fully complied with.
- 5/2/2011
In Canada, there are two solitudes of sorts when it comes to the discussion of ICT in healthcare. On one side are the technologists and stakeholders. On the other side are the citizen patients themselves.
- 4/25/2011
Sometimes if you repeat something often enough, it's taken as a common truth. One assumption – and certainly I'm as guilty of this as the next person – is that an aging population necessarily puts more pressure on the healthcare system.
