New tool aimed at streamlining health care being discussed in Vancouver

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – If you have a chronic health condition, have you ever been sent for the same test twice because one of your doctors was missing some information?

Or maybe you’ve had to start from scratch with a specialist because your GP didn’t pass on all the details.

A potential solution is being presented at a conference that gets underway in Vancouver today.

You can think about the Care Coordination Tool as one-stop shopping. Gary Folker with Orion Health, the software company behind it, says the tool allows a number of doctors to go to one place for information about their patient.

“So, if you can imagine a patient that’s perhaps discharged form the hospital that requires some sort of ongoing care, that care could be administered through a number of caregivers. It could be nursing staff, it could be physiotherapy, it could be a variety of caregivers that need to be involved in that patient’s care. And what it does is it allows you to coordinate all of that activity into a care plan so that each caregiver knows exactly where the patient is, what needs to get done, and their progress through the care continuum,” says Folker.

“A number of provinces have expressed some interest in doing this because there’s a high cost of care, particularly in hospitals. So, many of the ministries are looking for ways that they can better coordinate care, be it in the patient’s home or out in the community.”

Folker says they’ve been working with Ontario and have been getting good feedback from those using the tool.

“Basically, it started being used for patients here in Ontario… within the last six months, and it continues to kind of roll out and grow as time goes on.”

He tells us he has had discussions with a number of people in BC who have a continued interest in evolving continuing care of the patients outside of the hospital, but no contractual arrangements have been made with anyone in the province.

Cost largely depends on what is in place already.

Folker says the cost is sometimes not in the tool itself, but rather in how you have to get the data from several systems and integrating that data.

“We find that a lot of the information today resides in what we typically call silos of information, and we have to be abel to integrate that data from those silos so that we can then coordinate it and put it inside of the tool so the caregivers have access to it.”

Folker and his colleague are presenting the tool at the Canada Health Infoway Partnership Conference at the Sheraton Wall Centre. The conference is set to wrap up tomorrow.

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