May 28, 2014

eHealth Ontario unveils project to share patient information across province

Health care providers from across the province will soon have quick access to their patients’ diagnostic reports, thanks to a new initiative from eHealth Ontario.

In the summer of this year, more than 100 health care providers will take part in a limited production release of the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) Common Service, an initiative that will enable the sharing and viewing of patients’ diagnostic reports from across Ontario, to hospital and community-based health care providers anytime, anywhere.

The initial deployment of this initiative will enable health care providers to have access to DI reports regardless of their location. The reports will be available through eHealth Ontario’s One Portal, with further access channels enabled in subsequent releases.

The access to images and reports helps to eliminate the need for physical transfer of test results, and the costly duplication of scans when a patient moves from one hospital to another. Most importantly for patients, this network allows specialists at one facility to access reports acquired at other hospitals, allowing for more informed, timely medical decisions.

The next release of this project has already been initiated, that will enable viewing of diagnostic images via a provincial DI viewer that can be launched as standalone or in context from portal based applications and desktop applications by 2015.

All hospitals in the province that perform diagnostic imaging procedures are integrated with a regional Diagnostic Imaging Repository, (DI-r) that stores DI reports and images for viewing. Currently, each of the four repositories (NEODIN, SWODIN, GTA West, and HDIRs) allow all diagnostic images and reports obtained in Ontario hospitals to be available for viewing and sharing within each respective region. The new DI Common Service initiative will allow for cross-regional sharing of patients’ reports and images from any location across the province.

Privacy and Security:

eHealth Ontario’s privacy office ensures that the electronic exchange of PHI among patients and health care providers is conducted securely, protecting and enhancing individual privacy. The privacy office also promotes a culture of privacy within eHealth Ontario. Going beyond legislation and regulation, it employs the Principles of Privacy by Design to ensure that protection of PHI is embedded in all of the products, services, policies, procedures and processes developed by eHealth Ontario.

Further Information of Privacy and Security and the safeguards in place to protect personal/personal health information as well as policies which govern use of DI Common Service can be found on

• https://www.ehealthontario.on.ca/en/privacy
• https://www.ehealthontario.on.ca/en/about-us/security

Access, Correction and Consent Directives:

If you would like to place a consent directive on your record or would like to make an access & correction request, you can call eHealth Ontario Business Service Desk at 1-866-250-1554

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