What do you think of when you hear the words digital health? Is it the latest medical health tracker app? Your electronic medical record? Robot doctors?
Digital health includes all these tools, and many more. But the true essence of digital health – and the reason why it’s worth celebrating with its own Digital Health Week – is something much bigger than the technology itself.
Digital health is a technology-led evolution aimed at empowering patients and clinicians. It allows us to better monitor, manage and improve our own health and well-being, while allowing clinicians to improve patient outcomes through more responsive technology and better use of patient data.
In Canada and around the world, digital health is providing tremendous clinical value through improved access to care for patients, reduced costs, cost avoidance, greater efficiencies, and better quality of care.
The work we do at OntarioMD is guided by our aim to empower physician practices and enhance the care they and their teams provide patients using EMRs and digital health. We do this through focusing on innovation, and on forging strong relationships and collaborating with health care industry partners to offer products and services that deliver measurable value to the Ontario health care system. By connecting clinicians with the right tools to meet their practice objectives and ensuring they understand how to effectively use those tools, we help them follow up faster with patients, ensure better coordination of care between all health care providers connected to a patient’s circle of care, reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions, lower wait times, and avoid administrative costs.
Consider our award-winning Health Report Manager (HRM), for example. Clinicians using an OntarioMD-certified EMR can use HRM to securely receive patient reports into their EMR from participating hospitals and specialty clinics. With HRM, primary care providers know when their patients get discharged from a hospital or specialty clinic, and all medical record and diagnostic imaging reports they need to ensure effective follow-up are transferred directly into the patient’s medical chart in their EMRs. This eliminates the need for mailed or faxed paper reports and time staff spend handling them. Most importantly, it lets clinicians be more proactive and provide patients with the quality care they need, fast.
We’re also helping clinicians use digital health to take action to combat Canada’s growing opioid crisis. According to Health Canada in 2017, there were 4,000 opioid related deaths, up 25% from the year before.
Digital health offers the tools needed to better combat crises such as this. By tapping into the power of their EMR, clinicians can analyze their patient data to learning more about trends and demographics. Armed with this information, clinicians can identify those patients who are most at risk of opioid abuse, and monitor them to prevent addiction and overdoses.
OntarioMD’s Peer Leaders and EMR Practice Enhancement Program (EPEP) staff provide clinicians with important hands-on support to help them optimize how they input and use EMR data. Our Peer Leaders and staff have helped primary care providers learn how to use their EMRs to quickly identify their patients taking opioids, the number of different drugs prescribed, and the length of time they’ve been taking the drugs. Clinicians can then create alerts within the EMR to monitor patients on high doses and create a narcotics contract between clinician and patient that can help reduce the risk of addiction and further harm by opioids.
Whether you need help managing a high opioid risk population, or have other practice challenges and goals, OntarioMD Peer Leaders and staff are like a Geek Squad for clinicians. These clinical practice and technology experts can:
- Help you better understand your EMR’s functions and tools;
- Analyze your data entry and practice workflows, to improve the quality of patient data in your EMR;
- Proactively use EMR patient reminders, reports, population health informatics and more to improve your population health practices;
- Implement best data quality practices to access the most relevant patient information at the point of care
Digital health has the power to improve patient outcomes and help us live longer and healthier lives. But like any technology, the impact depends on the user’s understanding of how to tap into its full potential. By working with patients, clinicians, health care stakeholders and technology vendors, OntarioMD is working to advance digital health care, for the benefit of clinicians and patients across Ontario and all of Canada.
Keep up to date on digital health advances and our work by following OntarioMD on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Also, subscribe to our blog at www.ontariomd.blog and visit us online at www.ontariomd.ca for more info on all our products and services. If you have any questions or want to get connected to digital health products and services, please call us at 1-866-744-8668 or e-mail support@ontariomd.com.
