Sharing information is health care’s missing link
One-in-five Canadians have experienced medication errors or duplications
I keep hearing how Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Big Data will revolutionize health care. While we look to the future, let’s not ignore the technological challenges facing the industry today — specifically, inefficiencies in existing processes and technologies.
Have we become so accustomed to the notion that we are awaiting “the next new thing” that we have forgotten the current thing?
Health care is everyone’s business. At some point everyone will use the health system or know someone who does. Receiving the right care, quickly, and with dignity is the primary goal of everyone who works within our health system.
Often, we confuse care quality with how much is spent on care. More money doesn’t necessarily equal better care.
Redundant procedures and repetition require more resources and add no value to the patient’s health. In a system constrained by tight budgets, this is an ongoing challenge.
Health care is vast and complex and the difficulties within it are well-documented. The reality is budgets are finite and every taxpayer dollar is a sacred trust.
Many of the problems that exist today — such as long wait times and poor care co-ordination — are a result of information gaps that exist between care providers.
With the Orion Health Chronic Care Index (a Leger poll of 1,551 Canadians) we set out to learn how Canadians with chronic conditions perceive and interact with the health-care system.
The findings confirm what we suspected: Patients see significant room for improvement, especially when it comes to information-sharing.
Most interesting is that one-in-five Canadians with chronic conditions have experienced medication errors.
Medication errors put patients unnecessarily in harm’s way. They are preventable and given the risks associated with taking the wrong medication, there is not much room for error.
With proper care co-ordination and shared electronic health records, practitioners have access to the information they need to make the most informed decision and reduce the chance of error.
The survey also found nearly half of Canadians with chronic conditions (47 per cent) have had to repeatedly describe their condition, symptoms and medications every time they visited a care provider.
Inefficiency and redundancy aside, patients with chronic conditions often have a laundry list of symptoms and even medications. As a result, they are more likely to accidentally omit important medical information or report it incorrectly.
Accurate, complete information is key to decision-making, especially in health.
In addition, 16 per cent of Canadians report they have undergone unnecessary repeat procedures. I expect many of these would likely fall under medical imaging procedures, such as MRIs or CT scans, and hopefully not surgeries.
Regardless, repetitive procedures are unnecessary and not only clog the system, but do not improve the patient’s health.
Redundancies and inefficiencies are a shortfall of the system as a whole, and do not reflect the work of individual practitioners. Every misdiagnosis, redundant procedure and unnecessary question adds to wait times and subtracts from budgets.
With practitioners working in their own offices, hospitals, the community and other specialized facilities, it is important to have a means of sharing information seamlessly so practitioners can diagnose and treat their patients — with up-to-date and accurate information.
Complicating matters is the fact that countrywide, our health-care system is a patchwork with each province running its own system.
Using health-care budgets for costly rip-and-replace solutions is not the best approach. There is another way — one that leverages existing technologies and allows disparate health systems to communicate with one another, giving practitioners access to complete patient records.
The problems I have discussed exist at the intersection of communication and technology, when patients are being treated by multiple practitioners or being transitioned from a hospital, for example, back into the community.
The findings show that a sizable portion of Canadians with chronic conditions believe that care providers need a better means to share information.
For disparate health-care systems to realize their full value, integration of information is necessary.