Alan Hudson resigned on Wednesday as chairman of eHealth Ontario amid a controversy over lucrative contracts awarded without competitive tenders and nickel-and-dime spending on snacks by consultants, some of whom charged thousands of dollars a day for their services.
Dr. Hudson's departure marks a fall from grace in what many saw as a stellar record. Known as the man who could fix anything in health care, he was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's hand-picked choice to modernize the province's medical records.
“Today I want to acknowledge that our government came up short in the matter of eHealth,” Mr. McGuinty said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We should have done more to protect the public.”
The 71-year-old neurosurgeon and former hospital president was renowned for taking on huge health problems and then fixing them, such as reducing the province's wait times for key medical procedures. But he now finds himself leaving the embattled agency under a cloud.
Dr. Hudson has been replaced by Rita Burak, a bureaucrat who most recently served as chairwoman of electricity utility Hydro One.
The government also introduced new rules that ban its ministries and agencies from awarding any contracts to consultants without competitive tenders. Under the existing regime, contracts valued at less than $25,000 can be awarded without tenders.
As well, consultants will no longer be reimbursed for tea bags, donuts and another hospitality items that have been at the centre of the controversy over free-wheeling spending at eHealth Ontario.
Dr. Hudson is the second executive to leave eHealth Ontario in recent days. Sarah Kramer, his protégé and long-time business associate – whom he often described as brilliant – resigned as chief executive officer on June 6.
Under Dr. Hudson's guiding hand, Ms. Kramer was to lead the province's push to create a digital record of every resident's medical history.
The strategy is now in tatters at a time when Ontario already lags well behind other provinces in replacing paper-based medical records with electronic ones. Health care professionals say they fear that the controversy swirling around eHealth Ontario will further set back the McGuinty government's plans to create the digital record keeping system by 2015.
Dr. Hudson was appointed eHealth Ontario's chairman last September, shortly after the agency was created. A senior government official said Dr. Hudson was the logical choice. He earned the Premier's trust for getting results in reducing the province's wait times for hip and knee replacements and other medical procedures. In a sector that is plagued by gridlock and verbosity but little change, Dr. Hudson seemed to succeed where others failed.
“When you go into public life, you take on the risk of having your motivation improperly assessed,” Bob Bell, president and chief executive officer of the University Health Network, the hospital network Dr. Hudson once ran. “I don't feel so much sad as I feel disappointed that the discussion around processes of tendering and processes of appropriating executive pay have turned into a pretty nasty personal attack on the people involved.”
Dr. Hudson, he said, had a remarkable track record, creating “positive change.” It was not a surprise when he took the post as chairman of eHealth Ontario, trying to create electronic health records for all residents, focusing on three main areas: a diabetes registry, an eHealth portal and electronic medication prescribing, which would eliminate handwritten prescriptions and reduce medication errors.
eHealth Ontario assumed responsibility for creating electronic health records from Smart Systems for Health Agency, its predecessor, and the Ministry of Health itself. Given that the province had already spent $647-million on the initiative with little to show for it, eHealth Ontario took on a formidable job.
In the rush to deliver results quickly, officials at eHealth Ontario bypassed the traditional government procedures for hiring consultants by awarding lucrative contracts without competitive tenders. In the process, the agency became embroiled in controversy for its free-wheeling spending.
