A group of medical experts appointed by the Ontario government is calling for improving health technology — or eHealth — as part of their strategy to address overcrowding in hospitals.
The call came this month in the first of a series of reports from the Premier’s Council on Improving Healthcare and Ending Hallway Medicine. The group was assembled by Premier Doug Ford to propose solutions to “hallway healthcare,” a term used to describe the current lack of space in the healthcare system.
At the same time, provincial eHealth spending has decreased by 8% over the past four years, according to analysis of the government of Ontario’s spending records. This includes a reduction of more than 60% in capital spending, which represents the purchase of new hardware and eHealth equipment.
In the same period, the Ontario provincial government’s overall healthcare spending has grown at a rate of more than 9%.
Carlington Community Health Centre in Ottawa has seen the value of eHealth technology but has had to reduce usage as it became more expensive.
“It was the link that allowed us to have conference video with other providers,” said Executive Director Cam MacLeod. “The cost went up, and we had to make choices. So now we use very little of it.”
eHealth is a broad term for technology used for healthcare. It includes telemedicine — video chat for seeing your doctor — and Electronic Health Records, a digital record of a patient’s contact with the healthcare system that tracks important measurements like blood pressure and x-ray results.
OntarioMD, owned by the biggest organization representing doctors in Ontario, receives funding from the provincial government to implement eHealth technology and train care providers in its use. Today, it brings in 60% less annual revenue than it did in 2015.
According to OntarioMD’s CEO Sarah Hutchison, this is partly because they receive less and less money each year from a fund set up by the Ontario Medical Association to support doctors upgrading their technology. The money they receive from the provincial government has held steady.
“We’re serving more folks and doing more work,” said Hutchison. “But our funding envelop is not increasing.”
Hutchison’s company has been involved in eHealth for over 15 years. She said funding from the provincial government allows them to better link patients to their doctors or nurses, improving efficiency and unclogging the healthcare system.
She said the real problem with eHealth funding has more to do with how it’s handed out. Both the federal government and the regional bodies that allocate funds — called Local Health Integration Networks — are also trying to distribute their own eHealth funding.
“I think we need to work in a very aligned way,” Hutchison said. According to her, streamlining the system is an important step towards improving support for eHealth.
Politicians have echoed this sentiment, describing eHealth as being important, but also as being a “boondoggle.”
eHealth Ontario is the provincial organization tasked with provincial eHealth development. In 2009, the group was embroiled in controversy after a special report by the Auditor General found that the organization overpaid for favoured companies to be consultants on projects, resulting in high program costs.
eHealth Ontario did not return requests for a phone interview.
Just seven years after their initial report, the Ontario Auditor General released a follow-up news release indicating that although over $1 billion had been budgeted for eHealth initiatives by eHealth Ontario, only 80% of projects had been completed.
Canada Health Infoway is an organization that receives federal money and aims to improve access to healthcare across Canada through investments in new eHealth projects. They have also seen a 20% reduction in their revenues since 2015, according to analysis of their annual reports. A small amount of that money also goes to OntarioMD.
