Patient centred care still a way off
If doctors can whip out their smartphones to run tests on us, shouldn’t we be able to use our own to grab the results?
Patients should be benefiting from the same technological advances in the health-care system that they already get from their banks — mobile, portable service they can access at any time, argues Douglas Angus, a health-care policy expert at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa.
He pointed to countries such as Sweden and the United Kingdom — where patients can carry their own medical information on a machine-readable card — or Denmark, where everyone can make appointments, get medical advice and renew prescriptions online.
According to a comparison released this year by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, threequarters of Canadian doctors are using electronic medical records, up from a third in 2009.
However, only one in 10 patients can request appointments or referrals online, only seven per cent can request prescription refills online and fewer than one in five can view test results on a secure website, according to the study, which was based on a Commonwealth Fund survey of primary care doctors in 10 countries.
“We’ve come a long way from where we were 10 or 15 years ago, but we’re still lagging behind a lot of countries,” Angus said. “My health card is basically just an identification card that I present to my primary care physician when I got there. They scan it. That’s the extent of it.”
Angus carries a paper list of his medications while travelling the world, but notes he can use a bank card to take out money or bank online anywhere using his phone or iPad. “We can’t do that with our health information,” he said.
A Conference Board of Canada Study commissioned by the Canada Health Infoway — a federally funded organization that works with the provinces and territories to advance technology such as electronic health records — found that Canadians could gain an estimated 70 million hours in a year and skip 47 million in-person visits if they could use a device or computer to consult their health-care providers, get results of lab tests or Xrays and renew prescriptions electronically.
While eight in 10 Canadians surveyed by Ipsos Reid in 2013 said they want to have access to their own health-care information online, only four per cent actually did. Two-thirds thought it would make them healthier and threequarters thought it would make the health-care system more efficient.
“The younger physicians and other health-care professionals coming into the system have grown up with this technology,” Angus said.
“They’re saying, why do we have to have all this paper and why can’t we be sharing this information with our patients if we are really serious about shared decision making?”