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Conference Program

Thank you for attending our 2023 Conference. 

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Program (7:00am — 6:00pm)

Keep visiting this page for the latest updates on the conference program, announcements and more. 


Opening Remarks

8:30am — 8:45am

Presented by Robert Fox, Chief Executive Officer, OntarioMD, and Dr. Andrew Park, President, Ontario Medical Association


Keynote

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8:45am — 9:30am

André Picard kicks off the day, as one of Canada’s top health & public policy observers and commentators gives his perspective on the healthcare landscape with a digital health lens.

Presented by André Picard, Health Reporter, Columnist, The Globe and Mail

André Picard is one of Canada’s top health & public policy observers and commentators. He has been a part of The Globe and Mail team since 1987, where he is a health reporter and columnist. He is also the author of five bestselling books. Picard is an eight-time nominee for the National Newspaper Awards, Canada’s top journalism prize, and past winner of the prestigious Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service Journalism.
 
He was named Canada’s first “Public Health Hero” by the Canadian Public Health Association, as a “Champion of Mental Health” by the Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health, and received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, for his dedication to improving healthcare.
 
A graduate of the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, André has received honorary doctorates from six universities, including UBC and the University of Toronto. He is a seasoned communicator who employs a conversational style to reach his audience. Additionally, he enlivens his research and commentary with personal stories to provide context for his audience. Fluently bilingual, André will enlighten and pique a sense of curiosity of audience members from all educational backgrounds.   Behind the placid exterior lies an inquisitive, perceptive and industrious scribe for whom the work only begins with the official story.
 
The University of British Columbia recently announced André Picard as one of the Asper Visiting Professors at the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media for the 2020-2021 academic year, winter session. In 2020, Picard was awarded The Owen Adams Award of Honour. This award is the highest CMA award available to a non-physician.


Coaching Workshops

8:00am — 12:00pm

Get individual Peer Leader coaching with a Peer Leader who uses your EMR.  Peer Leaders can provide support and advice on how to best utilize your EMR and other digital health tools to enhance your office workflow and ease administration burden. Peer Leader appointments can be booked in 60-minute timeslots and limited slots are available.


8:15am — 12:15pm

These semi-private (up to 2 people at each table) coaching sessions are designed to provide you with a practical approach and guidance on leveraging your practice data and other available data sources to create and implement a Practice Improvement Plan. These sessions will be beneficial to any clinicians and their staff who are working on their quality improvement projects, including CPSO QI initiatives. The sessions are limited in availability.


1:15pm — 2:30pm

These 75-minute round table workshops will allow you to learn from OntarioMD Peer Leaders in a group environment. Ask Questions, network with other colleagues who are dealing with similar workflows. Get tips and tricks to improve practice efficiency and ease administrative burden. Peer Leaders using Accuro EMR, OSCAR PRO and PS Suite EMR will be accessible to you.


Sponsored Sessions



Educational Sessions

  • Reducing admin burden using technology
  • Enhancing patient care through technology innovation
  • Improving clinical workflow using digital health
  • Billing Optimization

Stream 1 — Advancing Patient Care with Tech

9:45am — 10:15am

This session will focus on HQ’s Health Hub unique custom-built EMR system that streamlines patient’s results and follow up visits. Participants will ascertain new tools and processes that they can utilize to create top-in-class customer experiences.

Presented by Hommood Alrowais, PhD, Data Scientist and Privacy Officer, and Victor Monroy, Research Analyst and Software Developer, HQ Health Hub

10:15am — 10:45am

Upon completion of this session, participants will recognize how electronic tools (eTools) can be utilized in EMRs to support adherence to asthma guidelines, as well as identify successful strategies and barriers to adoption.

Presented by Diane Lougheed, Division Respirology, Department of Medicine, Max Moloney, MSc and Madison MacKinnon, MSc, Queen’s University

11:10am — 11:40am

In this session, participants will discover the remarkable potential of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to identify a list of high-needs patients in their practice, who may not be top of mind because they rarely present. Attendees will acquire the knowledge/ skill how to conduct a query to generate and analyze a list of potential patients to prevent the need for future high-risk, high-cost interventions.

Presented by Jonathan Marcus, Family Physician, MCI The Doctor's Office, and Faiza Arslan, Physician Assistant, University of Toronto

11:40am — 12:10pm

In this session, participants will be able to identify time wasting activities, embrace paperwork and delegate effectively to reduce admin burden.

Presented by John Crosby, Heritage Family Health Organization (FHO), OMD Physician Peer Leader


Stream 2 — Practice Productivity/Decrease Admin Burden

9:45am — 10:15am

At the end of this session, participants will be able to develop an action plan to implement technology-driven improvements in form management.

Presented by Anish Mody, OMD Physician Peer Leader

10:15am — 10:45am

This session will outline the user benefits and challenges of Health Report Manager (HRM®). The talk will explore the pain points that have contributed to physicians' administrative burden and how new recommendations from the HRM Task Force can potentially lead to solutions that will address the pain points and significantly lessen the burden.

Presented by Rosemarie Lall, Family Physician, Platinum Medical FHO Lead, Department of Family and Community Medicine, The Scarborough Health Network, and Nicole Dziamarski, Manager, Products & Service Management, OntarioMD

11:10am — 11:40am

In this session, participants will be able to identify ways to improve charting using AI -scribes including setup for dictation during patient encounters and how AI scribes can help improve the patient encounter.

Presented by Keith Thompson, OMD Physician Peer Leader, Sydney Graham, OMD Patient Leader, and, Abbas Zavar, Program Analyst, OntarioMD

11:40am — 12:10pm

At the end of the session, participants should be able to select appropriate e-health tools and tailor them to their practice needs to increase efficiency and decrease administrative burden.

Presented by Tola Overduin, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon, O. Overduin Medicine Professional Corporation


Stream 3 — Principles to Practice (Privacy, Business Cont, Disaster Recovery, Data)

9:45am — 10:15am

This session will describe a new paradigm facilitated by OntarioMD for EMR users and EMR vendors that has many benefits for physicians. This new model identifies current gaps and potential solutions that OntarioMD and vendors can offer physicians to address their administrative burden and improve their experience with EMRs.

Presented by Robert Fox, Chief Executive Officer, Christopher Sulway, Chief of Strategy, Growth & Stakeholder Relations, and Simon Ling, Executive Director, Products and Services, OntarioMD

10:15am — 10:45am

In this session, the speakers will share insights, tools and best practices on innovative primary care engagement approaches for spread and scale purposes. The talk will illustrate and share data highlights, recommendations and demonstrate how clinician feedback plays a pivotal role in a future primary care pilot.

Presented by Natalie D. Montgomery, PhD, Adjunct Professor at Queen’s University, Department of Health Sciences at the School of Rehabilitation Therapy, and Daniel Glatt, Family Physician, Napanee, Ontario, Co-Chair of the Digital Support Structure for the Frontenac, Lennox & Addington Ontario Health Team (FLA-OHT)

11:10am — 11:40am

Understanding accountability obligations of the physician in a complex digital health landscape. What does this mean practically?

Presented by Ariane Siegel, Chief Privacy Officer and General Counsel, OntarioMD, Andrew Drummond, Director of Health Policy, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and Sharon Domb, OntarioMD Physician Peer Leader

11:40am — 12:10pm

Clinicians are busy caring for their patients, yet if the practice falls victim to a cyber attack, patient care can grind to a halt. Hear what the experts have to say on how clinicians can defend their practices and proactively take steps with their vendors to withstand attacks and continue their business.

Presented by Ariane Siegel, Chief Privacy Officer and General Counsel, OntarioMD, Sharon Domb, OntarioMD Physician Peer Leader, and John Solomos, Chief Executive Officer, Bluebird


Stream 4 — Integrating Innovations with your EMR

9:45am — 10:15am

At the end of the session, participants will be aware of Ontario Health's EMR Launcher, the eConsult Service, and how Primary Care Physicians can access Ontario Health services directly from their EMR with specific attention to the eConsult workflow.

Presented by Sutha Vivekanand, Manager Product Management, Ontario Health, and Alex Reidiboim, CISSP, PMP, AWS-SA and Azure-SA, Ontario Telemedicine Network

10:15am — 10:45am

At the end of this session, participants will be able to discuss how philosophy, ethics and cognition dovetails with the science of artificial intelligence to shape personal and social identity — and by extension, the concept of humanity in medicine.

Presented by Nadia Alam, MSc CCFP-A, Faculty at U of T DFCM and IHPME, Past-President of the Ontario Medical Association, Halton Healthcare Services - Georgetown

Short Snappers (11:10am — 12:10pm)

The short snappers will feature new innovations your colleagues are using to help reduce admin burden and enhance patient care. These four sessions will run for ten minutes each with five minutes for questions.

11:10am — 11:25am

At the end of the session, Participants should be able to assess different tools to successfully implement TAPTYPE for Intake, Triage and Consultation to increase workflow efficiency and clinical outcome in their practice.

Presented by Victor Youssef MD.CCFP, Founder and CEO of TAPTYPE, and Therese Ibrahim, MBBCh, MSc Diagnostic Radiology Medical Content R&D Team Lead at TAPTYPE

11:25am — 11:40am

Seamless use of AI for automating routine administrative workflows: Save your staff 100s of hours monthly.

An introduction to AI tools that significantly reduce time to completion of routine tasks essential to physician office workflows. We will share pilot and real-world results of task/tickler and inbound fax processing; freeing up staff to do more value-added work.

Presented by Shane Teper, Chief Medical Officer and Shreyansh Anand, Co-Founder, WaiveTheWait


11:40am — 11:55am

Participants will construct automated workflows within the Accuro EMR system using AutoHotKey, which will enable them to optimize workflows, increase revenue and reduce administrative frustrations.

Presented by Curtis Foong, Curtis Foong Medical Prof Corportion

11:55am — 12:10pm

Physicians: How many times have you been stuck on a clinical question in the middle of a busy clinic, and required a quick and reputable answer? Imagine asking your clinical query to an evidence-based resource for on-demand, up-to-date guidelines and getting the distilled answer within seconds.

At Pendium Health (www.pendium.health), a startup founded by a group of Toronto family physicians, we are developing a suite of AI-powered tools to improve physician productivity and support comprehensive care. Our flagship product, HippoAI, is a clinical decision support tool that leverages generative AI and advanced language models to help doctors make faster & safer decisions congruent to current standards of care.

Join us to learn more about how generative AI can be applied in a safe and effective manner in your day-to-day clinical practice. In this session, we’ll share some practical tips to consider when using AI-powered tools so you can shave hours off of your administrative duties.

Presented by 
Dr. Emily Chen, Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Omri Nachmani, Chief Technology Officer, and Dr. Stacy Nguyen, Chief Executive Officer, Pendium Health

1:15pm — 1:45pm

In this session, participants will explore Evidence2Practice Ontario’s evidence-based point of care tools and examine how change management and academic detailing support facilitated the implementation of digital tools for managing heart failure in a primary care physicians practice. Participants will be able to reflect on how E2P tools and supports are used at the point of care to enhance patient care and improve health outcomes.

Presented by
  • Roger Dacre, Primary Care Physician, Dr. Roger I Dacre Practice
  • Trish Rawn, Academic Detailing Service, Centre for Effective Practice
  • Kathy Irwin, Change Management Specialist, eHealth Centre of Excellence

1:45pm — 2:15pm

Join Dr. Ian Pun in a deep dive into the real-world applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, in clinical practice. Drawing on firsthand experiences, together we will learn and apply the power of LLMs in enhancing diagnosis, streamlining documentation, and refining clinical decision-making while tackling the depths of ethical considerations, potential biases, and strategies for effective AI integration into your workflow.

Presented by Ian Pun, Family Physician, IT Specialist, Lo Pun Medicine Professional Corp


11:40am — 12:10pm

Clinicians are busy caring for their patients, yet if the practice falls victim to a cyber attack, patient care can grind to a halt. Hear what the experts have to say on how clinicians can defend their practices and proactively take steps with their vendors to withstand attacks and continue their business.

Presented by Ariane Siegel, Chief Privacy Officer and General Counsel, OntarioMD, Sharon Domb, OntarioMD Physician Peer Leader, and John Solomos, Chief Executive Officer, Bluebird

Stream 5 — Billing

3:00pm — 6:00pm

Join the OMA to learn about billing for family medicine, including Physician Services Agreement (PSA) related billing changes. This OMA billing session will discuss PSA-related changes to billing, virtual care codes, comprehensive care obligations, preventive care bonuses and more!

At the conclusion of this activity, participants will be able to:

  • Understand their primary-care service obligations to patients and the contract that governs it
  • Identify billing resources available to support accurate billing
  • Enhance chronic disease and preventative care outcomes by linking to chronic disease and preventative care billing
  • Our physician billing expert will be on hand to answer your billing questions
Presented by Rick Tytus on behalf of the Ontario Medical Association

Closing Remarks

2:45pm — 3:00pm

Presented by Chandi Chandrasena, Chief Medical Officer, OntarioMD


Vendor Showcase

7:00am — 3:00pm

OntarioMD is bringing back its popular Vendor Showcase as part of our Digital Health Conference 2023. The showcase is designed to allow clinicians to learn more about EMRs and digital health tools. These innovative products and services should help clinicians improve practice efficiency, patient communication and outcomes.

See organizations participating in the Showcase


Start Up Zone

7:00am — 3:00pm

For the first time, we are pleased to introduce the Start Up Zone as part of our Digital Health Conference 2023. The Start Up Zone is designed to allow companies with new products and services to showcase these innovations to clinicians. These tools of the future should help clinicians improve practice workflow and benefit patient outcomes.


This event is an Accredited Group Learning Activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and approved by the SOGC. You may claim a maximum of 7.25 hours (credits are automatically calculated).

OMD Educates Digital Health Conference has been accredited by the College of Family Physicians, Ontario Office for up to 6.5 Mainpro+ credits.


Thank you to our Platinum Sponsor!

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