EHealth revamp vowed
Health Minister Eric Hoskins promises easier access to electronic medical records
The controversial eHealth Ontario medical records agency will be revamped to help doctors and nurses deliver improved service to patients, says Health Minister Eric Hoskins.
In the wake of a report Tuesday from Premier Kathleen Wynne’s business guru that recommends changes to eHealth, Hoskins promised an enhanced customer experience — without any privatization.
“I want to be clear: there will be no sale of people’s personal health information,” Hoskins said, vowing easier access to electronic records for patients health-care providers.
“There cannot be and will not be utilization of it for purposes other than the medical benefit for patients in the health-care system and there will be no sale of the province’s digital health assets.”
His comments came after Ed Clark concluded eHealth has provided “significantly” more than $5.7 billion in value to the province since 2007, but can do better.
“I am struck by how Ontario’s digital health progress is a classic glass half full/glass half empty situation,” Clark wrote in a 48-page report commissioned by Hoskins.
“By this I mean that tremendous progress has been made to date, but such progress also underlines the need to do more, faster,” he wrote, recommending a new “digital health secretariat” to oversee eHealth.
Clark added eHealth’s mandate should have “an explicit focus on technology service delivery and to ensure the agency is held to account for delivery” of those services.
“Specifically, eHealth Ontario should focus on core activities, completing the connecting projects and operating and sustaining them in a way that is consistent with industry best practices,” he wrote.
Hoskins asked Clark on Oct. 7 to prepare for help “in valuing public and private assets with respect to Ontario’s digital health strategy” to determine next steps for eHealth.
At Queen’s Park, the former TD Bank CEO and unpaid adviser to the premier is best known as the architect of expanding beer and wine sales into supermarkets and for recommending the sell-off of up to 60 per cent of Hydro One to pay for transit and roads.
In his report, Clark noted that when he was running the bank, they had 23 million customers across North America, providing access around the clock with appropriate privacy safeguards in place.
“The technical issues of running such a system and running a healthcare data system are not so different. The people and organizational issues certainly are,” he wrote.
Clark rejected the conventional wisdom that government-run information technology projects are worse than those in business.
“I’m not so sure that governments are so terrible at it. The fact is that you don’t get to hear about all the mistakes that the private sector makes on their projects and the private sector has a different attitude to mistakes,” he said.
“In Silicon Valley, they celebrate when projects go bad because they view it as a huge learning experience, whereas in government you then have an inquiry and the whole system goes quiet and says ‘Oh my God, let’s take the most conservative approach.’ ”
While eHealth has had some successes, it is dogged by past controversies, including an expense-account scandal where private consultants earning $3,000 a day billed taxpayers for $3.99 Choco-Bite cookies and $1.65 Tim Hortons tea.