OntarioMD welcomes Premier’s Council Report on Ending Hallway Healthcare

OntarioMD, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ontario Medical Association, welcomes Dr. Rueben Devlin's first report on Improving Healthcare and Ending Hallway Medicine. We look forward to working with the Premier's Council, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and our partners to optimize the use of relevant, high-quality digital health tools integrated with electronic medical records (EMRs) by community-based physicians in all parts of the province to deliver increasingly efficient, effective and integrated care to patients.   

Digital health tools and services measurably improve patient access and clinical information sharing across the delivery system. OntarioMD is funded by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to support 16,000 community-based physicians and 1,000 nurse practitioners to adopt and use digital health tools with several successful initiatives that are improving patient outcomes:

• Electronic Medical Records – An indispensable tool for physicians and nurse practitioners to manage patient information, receive lab results, check for drug interactions and much more 
  
  
• EMR-Integrated Digital Health Tools – Clinicians prefer to access digital health tools from within their EMRs to access patient information more efficiently 
  
  
• Health Report Manager (HRM) – sends eNotifications and reports such as discharge summaries from hospitals to physicians' and nurse practitioners' EMRs so they can coordinate care as soon as a patient is discharged and prevent complications that may send patients back to the hospital 
  
  
• Ontario Laboratories Information System – an eHealth Ontario tool that sends lab results to EMRs enabling EMRs to identify trends and can intervene appropriately and keep patients healthy 
  
  
• eConsult – lets physicians and nurse practitioners ask specialists questions and receive responses quickly so patients don't have to wait unnecessarily to see a specialist  

OntarioMD is working with its partners to expand these important digital health tools and support more physician and nurse practitioner practices to access them and use them effectively.  At OntarioMD, we are committed to ensuring that patients also have direct access to tools and information in their care journey. 

We have initiated work in 2019 to integrate new digital health tools with EMRs:

• Digital Health Drug Repository and Digital Health Immunization Repository - lets clinicians know which drugs and vaccinations patients have received to keep them safe from adverse drug reactions and possible side effects of duplicate vaccinations 
  
  
• EMR Quality Dashboard – will allow physicians and nurse practitioners to efficiently and effectively manage their entire patient population based on recognized key indicators such as patients with diabetes
  

OntarioMD is proud to be delivering these initiatives on behalf of the Ontario Government and we stand ready to do more using technology to improve the patient experience and address the challenges that are contributing to Ontario's hallway medicine crisis.