Blog: Infoway Connects

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Michael Green

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We are pleased to publish our 2019-2020 Annual Report – Connecting Canadians Through Health Care Innovation. I hope you will take some time to review it to learn about the collective progress we’ve made across the country to improve Canadians’ access to their personal health information and to digital health tools and services.

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Bobby Gheorghiu, Waldo Beauséjour and Nicole Simms

What happens when a pandemic meets a heat wave? It’s a question that many jurisdictions are asking themselves this summer, weighing the need for emergency cooling centres against the continued need for physical distancing. This intersection between COVID-19 and climate change shows in microcosm the interconnections between health systems and natural systems.

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Nancy Gupta and Sukirtha Tharmalingam

When disease is suspected, how long does it take a patient to go from biopsy to diagnosis and treatment plan? It depends where you live. Across Canada, it can take anywhere from days, weeks, or months.

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Katie Bryski and Ellie Yu

It’s a brave new world in health care. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Canadians have turned increasingly to virtual care. According to Infoway’s ongoing tracking survey, virtual visits accounted for almost half of health care visits in May 2020. But what does this shift to virtual care mean for patients and how patients engage with the health care system?

Posted on June 23 by Darek Szadkowski

We all know the old adage that “the customer is always right.” The philosophy of customer centricity takes the idea further: it means working in a way that focuses first on providing a positive customer experience. To realize this philosophy, PrescribeIT^® has established the Product Excellence team, responsible for end-to-end product and workflow excellence to ensure market adoption and sustainability, while also ensuring and improving patient safety.

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Nancy Gupta and Simon Hagens

How are you holding up? No, really, how are you feeling? Specifically, in terms of your mental health?

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Katie Bryski

It’s unsettling, going unseen. Several years ago, I sat in an exam room with Kleenex scrunched in my fist. The clinician had just suggested a common procedure — except it wouldn’t be routine for me. Quite the opposite. As she did her best to offer assurance, I felt the realization slowly build. You don’t understand why I’m upset.

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Anne Baldwin 

When PrescribeIT^® launched in Lethbridge, AB, in February 2018, it was the first community in the province to use the e-prescribing service. It was also among the first in the country. As early adopters, Lethbridge prescribers and pharmacists had a unique opportunity to help make the service the best it could be, a prospect they actively took up.

“We were one of the initial PrescribeIT^® users,” says Dr. David Steward, a physician with Family Medical Centre in Lethbridge. “We tested it and tried to help alleviate some of the challenges that were initially there.”

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Seema Nayani 

Gone are the days when clinicians practiced at only one specific site. Currently, many work at a few different sites part-time, or even as a fill-in or relief. Like many of my colleagues, I provide patient care at a few different sites as a community pharmacist.

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Katie Bryski

It’s been nine weeks since I came home and stayed home. In that time, we’ve seen extraordinary growth of virtual care across Canada. As our health system faces unprecedented challenges, virtual care has proven to be an invaluable tool.

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Katie Bryski

Have you ever wondered where a work day has gone? A few minutes troubleshooting here and there can add up with astonishing speed. In a busy clinic, those small diversions carry a heavy weight.

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Katie Bryski and Dr. Rashaad Bhyat

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, virtual care is filling a larger role in health care. Telephones, video chats and secure messaging allow clinics to keep their digital doors open while ensuring that clinicians and patients stay safe and maintain physical distancing. In our last blog post, we discussed some of the factors behind Canada’s rapid adoption of virtual care. In this follow-up, let’s dive a little deeper and see how a virtual care appointment might unfold.

Posted on April 28, 2020 by Katie Bryski and Dr. Rashaad Bhyat

It’s an uncertain and frightening time for health care. The COVID-19 virus has brought unprecedented new challenges for the health system; we are all in uncharted territory as we attempt to flatten the curve. But while it isn’t business as usual for health care right now, Canadians are finding that it is business as virtual.

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Tanya Achilles

In 2016, driven by Canada Health Infoway’s (Infoway’s) e-prescribing initiative, Infoway and Health Canada undertook a project to create the Canadian Clinical Drug Data Set, a national drug terminology. This was a first of its kind in Canada and created a product that was already available in many other countries. What was unique to the Canadian approach was that the work was led as a partnership between the national drug regulator and the national digital health agency. Leveraging Infoway and Health Canada’s expertise and engaging an advisory group of vendors, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, safety organizations and jurisdictional representatives, a clinically focused drug terminology was developed by transforming and enhancing existing Health Canada drug content.

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Jamie Bruce

The world has changed significantly over the past few weeks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Terms such as “physical distancing” have entered the lexicon, parents are taking on the challenge of homeschooling and Zoom video meetings have become a daily norm for many of us. For health care workers, it has meant very quickly finding a way to connect with patients virtually whenever possible for the sake of everyone’ safety — the doctor’s, the patient’s, and their families. I’m proud that Infoway is playing a role in making that happen through its Electronic Medical Record (EMR)-Virtual Care Investment Program.

Posted on April 9, 2020 by Dr. Rashaad Bhyat

In February, the Canadian Medical Association, working with the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, released their Virtual Care Task Force’s report entitled “Virtual Care Recommendations for Scaling Up Virtual Medical Services.” With the release of the report, I speculated that 2020 might be a watershed year for virtual care in Canada, particularly in my specialty of Family Medicine.

Posted on April 7, 2020 by Shelagh Maloney

The World Health Organization (WHO) established World Health Day in 1948 to raise awareness of the importance of health. On this World Health Day, that simple message – health is important – has never been more relevant.  

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Anil Patel

Health care organizations need the ability to share health information consistently and efficiently, and the current COVID-19 public health emergency illustrates why.

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Simon Hagens

In 2014 Infoway published “Understanding the Gap Between Desire for and Use of Consumer Health Solutions.” This analysis revealed that while eight in 10 Canadians wanted access to their personal health information, only four per cent had accessed it electronically.^[1]