A Message from our CEO, Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia | |
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As you can see in our year-end highlights below, 2023 has been another busy and productive year here at the eHealth Centre of Excellence and I am enormously proud of our team and our partners – but there’s so much more we all need to do to support our healthcare system.
There is no doubt that primary care is the nucleus of healthcare: having a regular primary care clinician improves health outcomes by offering proactive and continuous care, decreasing the risk of emergency department visits and associated healthcare costs. And yet, the Ontario College for Family Physicians estimates that by 2026, 4 million Ontarians could be without a family doctor.
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What can we do to help with this crisis in primary care? Here’s what we know: primary care clinicians are spending 40% of their time on mundane administrative tasks, time which could be spent on direct patient care. Moreover, these administrative tasks are a contributing factor to clinician burnout, which is also impacting our family doctor shortage.
That’s where digital health, when used appropriately and co-designed with clinicians, can be a real asset. Virtual assistants or “bots” developed by our eCE Automates division have been proven to save time, allowing clinicians to focus on higher-value tasks. Using eReferral to streamline and centralize the referral process is another time-saver and has been shown to reduce wait times, and Evidence2Practice Ontario (E2P) EMR-integrated tools enable improved access to the most up-to-date best practice information at the point of care (removing the onus on clinicians to spend time finding/updating this information themselves).
We are committed to continuing to work with clinicians and other partners to provide solutions that address the very real issues facing our healthcare system today. What’s coming in 2024? We’re currently exploring how we can leverage new and innovative technologies, such as attended bots and generative AI. We’re also looking to launch another Think Tank with clinicians through our Healthcare Experience and Advancement Lab (HEAL), so we can work together to co-design solutions that work for them.
There’s a lot to be excited about, but in the meantime, I’d like to wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season on behalf of our whole team at the eHealth Centre of Excellence, and we look forward to reconnecting in the new year.
Thank you and be well,
Mohamed
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The eHealth Centre of Excellence goes National! | |
Over the past year, we’ve been moving forward digital health initiatives in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, both at the elbow and virtually. These projects have included supports from our award-winning program management office, change management team, and knowledge translation and evaluation team. | |
We are also now offering eCE Shield, a cybersecurity and privacy self-learning program available across Canada in both English and French! Certified for up to 7.5 Mainpro® credits, eCE Shield is helping healthcare professionals learn how to safeguard their sensitive information. | |
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Highlights from the Ontario eServices Program | |
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The Ontario eServices Program brings eServices (eReferral and eConsult) to clinicians throughout Ontario, improving the healthcare experience for clinicians and patients. The program is co-led by the eHealth Centre of Excellence and the eConsult Centre of Excellence and supported by regional deployment teams throughout Ontario.
With more than 1.75M eReferrals processed to date, our team is working hard to improve the eReferral system by enabling as many system integrations as possible.
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2023 eReferral Highlights
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There were 35 integrations between Ocean eReferral and other systems, including Cerner, Cerebrum™, Novari health, Caredove, Excelicare, Meditech, Epic, Telus CHR and others
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The integrations led to an additional 63,275 eReferrals being processed throughout 2023
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87% of patients are satisfied with eReferral
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2023 eConsult Highlights
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To date 550,000 eConsults have been sent since program inception across all our 4 services
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eConsult currently has 23,775 registered senders and almost 2,459 registered specialists to answer eConsults
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Over 130 specialties offered province-wide
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Our eCE Automates family of bots kept on growing! | |
The eCE Automates team was excited to add a new bot to our growing family: Poppy! Poppy supports population health management and was featured in last month’s newsletter if you’d like to learn more about what Poppy can do for you. |  | |
Over this past year, we also participated in the ASAPP project, which uses the Cody bot created by our eCE Automates team to connect remotely to the EMR and seamlessly run in the background to “clean up” and standardize patient data in the problem list, based on ICD-9 or SNOMED-CT codes for patient conditions. A patient algorithm search then identifies and segments complex patients at risk for hospitalizations and ER visits based on medical and socioeconomic data.
What’s next? Through Healthcare Experience and Advancement Lab (HEAL) Think Tank sessions with clinician participants, we have co-designed an additional bot prototype that will help manage and prioritize messages within the lab and message inbox in the EMR.
We have lots of exciting ongoing work and new projects coming up – stay tuned for more in 2024!
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Evidence2Practice Ontario: offering three condition-specific EMR tools to support point-of-care delivery | |
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Our team was hard at work developing Evidence2Practice Ontario (E2P) tools that give primary care clinicians access to best practice information at the point of care. These tools are now available in TELUS PS Suite, OSCAR Pro, and Accuro QHR, for:
- Heart failure
- Anxiety disorders and depression in adults
- Diabetes
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The tools can be downloaded directly from our community portal and come with change management support from our team at no cost. Our partners at the Centre for Effective Practice also provide academic detailing (one-on-one sessions with a clinical pharmacist), giving clinicians the most up-to-date information. | |
See our team out and about! | |
We’re always happy to get out there and connect with stakeholders to talk about all things digital health. This year, we participated in several national, provincial, and regional conferences and events. Hope to see you next year at the Family Medicine Summit, e-Health 2024, and more! | |
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Media Moments
The eHealth Centre of Excellence made headlines this year! Click the links below to learn more.
- Our CEO, Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia, was interviewed on CBC News: The National for a segment (pictured below) on how centralizing surgical waitlists and employing eReferral technologies can help to reduce wait times and accelerate access to care.
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Ontario Medical Review also interviewed Mohamed about the benefits of adopting and scaling a centralized eReferral system.
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Ted Alexander, our Vice President of Partnerships and Clinical Innovation, was featured in the latest issue of Canadian Healthcare Technology for the innovative work being done by our eCE Automates division to help reduce the risk of clinician burnout.
- Our Manager of Product Development and Innovation, Justin Wolting, was also recently interviewed by Healthy Debate for an article on how our Cody bot can take on the time-consuming task of standardizing EMR data.
- Mohamed gave a two-part interview to How It’s Med podcast on some of the challenges our healthcare system is currently facing, and how our family of bots is making administrative work for physicians a hassle-free task.
Please reach out to info@ehealthce.ca if you have any questions!
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Qualifying our work with evidence: several new case studies and evidence briefs produced this year | |
Knowledge Translation and Evaluation is a key component of all programs led by the eHealth Centre of Excellence, ensuring that the technologies we support are enabling best practices and ultimately improving the quality of patient care. The following case studies/evidence briefs were published this year, demonstrating the benefits of employing digital health. | |
If you have an idea for a future case study or evidence brief or would like to provide a testimonial, please contact info@ehealthce.ca. | |
We were named one of the Best Workplaces in Canada in 2023 by Great Place to Work! | |
One of the highlights of 2023 was the opportunity to celebrate our team and the great workplace culture we enjoy here at the eHealth Centre of Excellence when we were selected as one of the Top 50 Best Workplaces in Canada in our size category by Great Place to Work®. Our people are our strongest asset, and we appreciate their commitment and their genuine excitement for the work we are doing to enhance our healthcare system. | |
We hope you all have a healthy holiday season and our best wishes for a happy and productive year ahead! | | | | |
