Blog

by Sarah Hutchison, OntarioMD Chief Executive Officer

The global pandemic has brought a new urgency and demand for digital transformation of health care in Canada and around the world. 

With more than 15 years as a trusted leader in clinical engagement and digital health solutions, OntarioMD is well positioned to provide thought leadership and explore new avenues of innovation so that together we can push boundaries to embrace meaningful health system transformation and excellent care to patients. 

Our focus is on providing and supporting the use of technology that adds value to clinicians, patients and the health system. 

As we considered our strategic position, we recognized the extraordinary stresses and strains on our health system and all those that interact with it; uncertainty, unpredictability and a need to do things differently almost overnight when we were faced with the pandemic. Because change is our currency, we see the opportunity to accelerate and leverage digital innovation we know how to create to advance a healthier Canada to benefit many more. 

We imagined how we could influence and shape the future of digital health in a changing world, and we set ourselves some stretch goals and made bold commitments as we seek to find new ways to play a leading role. 

Because the possibilities seemed endless, we focused in our 2020-25 Strategic Plan on areas where we feel we can make the most impact:  

• The digital future of practice 
• Health system transformation 
• Data integration and  
• Patient activation. 

When we think of the digital future of practice, we know virtual care, cloud-based data integration and AI each will play a central role.  

OntarioMD stands ready to support this accelerated pace of change to health care delivery through change management support and education. Our team across the province are in the (now virtual) field every day helping clinicians navigate the dynamic environment we live and work in.  

OntarioMD Peer Leaders understand clinical practice because they have been there, and they draw on that experience and their deep knowledge of digital systems to enable, engage and support the critical change management necessary for clinicians to improve workflow and data quality, create more efficiency and ultimately improve patient care. Our Peer Leaders are an amazing group of leaders and a truly extraordinary resource for clinician practices. 

Over the next five years, we expect our Peer Leaders to be increasingly focused on meeting demand for coaching on how to get the most out of our award-winning Insights4Care Dashboard. Some clinicians have called this Dashboard a gamechanger in extracting valuable data from their EMR to visualize and act on patient data in real time. 

In a digital world, we know that good reliable data is everything. And integrating data can accomplish extraordinary things.  

We are partnering across Canada to bring together our collective efforts and experience to accelerate our impact; to do more together than we could ever accomplish otherwise.  We are privilege to have both great federal and provincial partners and extraordinary vendors who see the opportunity in working together.   

OntarioMD recognizes the power of integrated data and as such a key pillar of our five-year strategy is to support this phenomenon through: 

• Mobilizing Health Report Manager (HRM®) for pandemic response, notifying clinicians within their EMRs if OLIS registers that a patient has tested positive for COVID-19 
• Enhancing HRM to enable communication and data exchange across the system 
• Leveraging EMR data using specific i4C Dashboard indicators related to the social determinants of health to care for patient populations 

Our hope is that an integrated system will enable patients to play an increasing role in managing their own care as they access information about themselves through portals, mobile apps and remote monitoring devices. 

OntarioMD can support the safe activation of patients by engaging with them through our new Patient Leader Program to ensure we understand how the services we provide to clinicians can help them the most. And we can ensure the privacy and security training we offer to clinicians protects their personal health information. 

To help us achieve our goal toward transformation, OntarioMD’s three strategic areas of focus over the next five years are to be: 

• A leading delivery partner, 
• A digital health advocate, and 
• A driver of corporate growth and sustainability. 

At OntarioMD, we believe the collective effort to coordinate digital health services to address the transformation of health care delivery is of national importance.  

The world will continue to change over our next five years together. That much we know.  

OntarioMD will embrace the change, influence it, and inform it. As we create more intelligent systems and more insight-oriented tools, we will ensure adapting to the future of health care is seamless – exciting even – for health care providers and the patients they serve. 

To find out more about OntarioMD’s suite of digital health tools, visit OntarioMD’s website at www.ontariomd.ca or contact us at info@ontariomd.com.