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January 30, 2005
Health care needs hi-tech transfusion
TheStar.com - Health care needs hi-tech transfusion
Health care needs hi-tech transfusion
This might just be the year the high-tech revolution in health care that is sweeping the world finally makes it onto Canada's radar screen.
Currently, Canada lags behind other major industrialized countries in adopting new medical records technologies. For example, Britain is spending the equivalent of $14 billion to create lifelong electronic patient records. British officials believe that having medical histories available at the push of a button can save lives and avoid costly duplication. Swedish doctors have long been wired into high-tech patient data banks. And e-prescribing and bedside technology that allows doctors to send data both to and from remote locations has become routine elsewhere in Europe.
This week, the United States jumped on the bandwagon when President George W. Bush announced a major campaign to computerize records in doctors' offices and hospitals. His goal is to end the poor or incomplete record-keeping and prescription errors that have endangered lives.
The World Health Organization estimates that one in 10 hospital patients in the industrialized world is a victim of preventable medical mistakes that could be greatly eased by better information technology.
But Canada? This is the place where only two years ago health officials used colour-coded sticky notes to track patients at risk when SARS hit the country. We have moved forward since then, but barely.
The new Health Council of Canada did us all a favour this week by forcing the issue onto the national agenda. The council, created to monitor provincial spending of federal money on promised health-care innovations, used its inaugural report to question the pace of modernization. Council chairman Michael Decter said he would like to have the entire country wired to electronic records within five years. However, at the rate it is going, Canada will be lucky if it gets half way to that goal.
Canada Health Infoway, the federal body given $1.2 billion to partially fund high-tech innovations, hopes to create a national electronic health record. It would contain information on illnesses, surgeries, chronic conditions, drugs prescribed, laboratory tests and diagnostic images that form an individual's health record that will be accessible at medical facilities anywhere in Canada. The goal is to have the basic elements of a program available to 50 per cent of Canadians by the end of 2009.
But even if the provinces match this money, Canada will still fall as much as $10 billion short of what it needs spend on technology.
True, other parts of the health-care system also need money. But technology is an essential ingredient confronting the one complaint health-care experts agree on: Canada does not have a health-care system. Rather, it has a series of players — family doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, nursing homes — few of whom speak to each other electronically.
If Canada is truly to move toward primary-care reform, with health-care professionals working as a multi-disciplinary team, it must find ways to let the information start flowing between various caregivers. Technology, backed up by laws that come down hard on anyone caught violating patient confidentiality, is our best hope of making the system seamless.
Posted by cmayaud at 10:58 PM | Permalink| Comments (0)
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