A recent story from CBC News explains that a shortage of health care staff in Northern Ontario is being alleviated, in part, by digitital health records. That article sparked this blog post, which is Part One of a two-part examinination of the digitization of health records – aka the movement towards EMR (electronic medical records).

When I was about 5 years old, my school library kept track of its books using little cue cards stashed by the hundreds in tiny drawers (you all know what I’m talking about). All of my book searches since kindergarten have involved a computer. Am I to believe that our libraries did, almost 20 years ago, what our health care system is starting to do now?

The CBC article tells us that, “Digital networks help to bridge staffing gaps at Canadian hospitals.” It is true – hospitals in Ontario (and the rest of  Canada) have only recently started the move towards EMR. If the digitization of, say, written communication made headlines, people would be wondering how they ended-up back in 1994. Imagine reading the following headline today: “Canadian companies use electronic mail to cut-out time spent waiting for letters to get to Europe.”

It seems unjustifiable that our health care system has not made better use of technology. I see little downside in using technology that we’ve been using for years in countless domains, to get care to people (eg Northern Ontarions in need of a radiologist) who have been waiting far too long. Continue…