CORRECTION: Andy Canham is the president of Sun Microsystems, which has reached a deal with the B.C. government to establish a province-wide system of health care electronic record-keeping. Incorrect information appeared in the B.C. section of Tuesday's Globe and Mail.
British Columbia is about to hit the big leagues in health-care electronic record-keeping, an area often cited by experts as a key to resolving many of medicare's current woes.
In a multimillion-dollar deal to be announced Tuesday, the province has contracted with Sun Microsystems (B.C.) Inc. and other partners to establish a provincewide electronic system of health data aimed at improving patient care and reducing medical errors.
The project, funded largely by the federal government agency Canada Health Infoway, is the largest of its kind to be launched in Canada, and one of the largest eHealth ventures in North America.
Health Minister George Abbott said the system, when fully operational, has the potential to be "the biggest single advance toward better health care ever. It's huge. . . . It's revolutionary in terms of patient care."
Despite billions of new dollars spent every year on Canada's public health-care system, record-keeping has remained largely rooted in the technological stone age.
A majority of doctors still rely on handwritten patient files, while health-care institutions are rarely capable of communicating patient data with each other by computer.
B.C.'s system is designed so that, eventually, every health-care provider in the province will have electronic access to lab-test results, diagnostic imaging and medical records of individual patients, Mr. Abbott said.
"We hope that the old paper files kept by doctors will be a thing of the past."
Rigid security safeguards will be part of the system in order to ensure patient privacy, said Sun Microsoft president Andy Canham.
"I think the biggest benefit will be speedier patient care. Instead of spending time trying to match various sources of information on paper and other forms, health-care professionals will be really focused on caring and treating their patients," Mr. Canham said.
Richard Alvarez, president and CEO of Canada Health Infoway, said health records represent the last frontier where the technological advances that have swept so much of treatment techniques in the 21st century have yet to be applied.
There are too many silos, with information locked away in hospitals and doctors' offices, he said.
"This will begin to bring all that together. We will have patient-centric data, centred around you and me -- the patient, not around the hospital and doctor offices.
"I think this is a huge step from a cultural point of view and a true reformation of modernizing health care," he said.
Having all lab tests stored electronically is also expected to significantly reduce the number of unnecessary tests conducted.
Studies have shown that up to 15 per cent of diagnostic tests get lost or are ordered by clinicians unaware their patient has had the same tests done previously.
Under B.C.'s new electronic system, parts of which could be running within 24 months, health-care providers will be able to access all laboratory tests conducted on their patients, erasing the likelihood of needless retests.
"From a patient inconvenience point of view, that's huge," Mr. Alvarez said.
"And from a diagnostic point of view, it's tremendous, being able to get together lab results and medication history to provide a faster, more accurate diagnosis."
Advocates of centralized, electronic record-keeping also believe the new system will result in fewer medical errors.
"When you talk to clinicians about what they need in terms of making a more accurate diagnosis, they will tell you they need lab results, medication history and access to diagnostic images from radiation technologists," he said.
"This is really about presenting an individual history to the right provider at the right time to improve the outcome. That's what this is all about."
The project's aim is to have every physician's office in the province hooked up to the system, with ready access to individual medical records, although only with patient consent.
"The more this is used, and the more people on the system," Mr. Canham said, "then the more valuable it becomes."
