Digital Health

In our comprehensive health system, patients work with a myriad of health care professionals to meet their specific needs. Physicians, pharmacists, hospitals and personal support workers, to name a few, all contribute to a patient’s holistic care....

As physicians, we constantly look for ways to improve our practice, including staying up-to-date on the latest research, guidelines and best practices to ensure we offer our patients the best care available. Part of this also includes making sure our...

Physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and other clinicians all play an important role in patient care. In the current landscape of the health care system, providers far too often operate in silos. Despite this recognition, we still haven’t fully...

Follow @lindamonico On February 16, Canada joins the Regenstrief Institute in celebrating 25 years of LOINC®. It’s an unprecedented success in pursuing laboratory and clinical data exchange, and though you may not know it, you’re benefiting from LOINC.

As the health care needs of Canadian families evolve, structures providing care, such as primary care, must evolve accordingly. The Patient`s Medical Home (PMH) is the vision for the future of family practice presented by the College of Family...

In my digital health work here in Canada and around the world, I regularly hear the ill-framed, but nonetheless pertinent question, “With the rising popularity of FHIR, what is the role for IHE?” This question is pertinent because of how much hype...

For as long as I have been working in health care, I have been hearing, reading and/or discussing the need for disparate IT and health care solutions to talk to each other — to communicate and share information.

Email, auto-fax and e-prescribing — one of these methods of prescribing is not like the other. While on the surface, emailed and auto-faxed prescriptions may look the same as e-prescribing, there's a big difference between them when it comes to patient...

Prescriptions for medication are a regular part of the lives of most Canadians. A recent survey conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by Infoway found that 65 per cent of Canadians aged 18 and over have obtained a prescription in the past two years,...

It may be a surprising stat to some, but roughly 30 per cent of prescriptions generated in Canada by prescribers for their patients go unfilled.¹ Reasons range from prescriptions that are lost or damaged, to the cost of the medications, to...

I recently had an appointment with a specialist and she provided me with a prescription and booked a follow-up appointment in a month to check whether the medication was working. She also mentioned that sometimes the medication takes a good two weeks to...

Over the past decade, Infoway has been investing in telehomecare (also known as remote patient monitoring or RPM) programs in Canada, delivering health services to patients in the comfort of their own home.

As I mentioned in Part One of this blog post, Infoway recently released the results of a pan-Canadian study about the value of connected health information. Connected Health Information in Canada: A Benefits Evaluation Study , found that the growing use...

At Island Health, we believe in assessing the value of the projects we undertake, and I was brought on to Island Health’s Home Health Monitoring (HHM) team to help evaluate the program and produce a report measuring the program’s overall success. One of...

What does connected health information mean to you? For me, it means that when I show up at my upcoming medical appointment with my midwife who is managing my pregnancy, she can see my latest lab test results to make sure my iron and glucose levels are...

We live in the age of information. Medicine in particular is experiencing a rapid expansion of the volume of knowledge ¹ , and physicians must manage this information efficiently to care effectively for their patients.

I first became involved in patient/health advocacy when I became an accidental advocate for my brother, who was dying from cancer. Following this, I was an advocate for my father when he was dying from cancer. My advocacy became a full time job and a...

As one of the patient partners awarded a scholarship to attend this Patients Included conference, I was very grateful and pleased to be able to bring a patient lens to the event. We were warmly included and appreciated at the Partnership Conference....

If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be remotely monitoring patients with chronic diseases using smart devices in the comfort of their homes I would never have believed you.

My experience with eHealth Saskatchewan’s Citizen Health Information Portal (CHIP) began in the spring of 2016. A request went out to residents of Saskatchewan to sign on to the pilot project; I did, and became one of the initial 1,000 participants.