Advocacy and Initiatives

Doctors of BC is working with health care partners to inform, guide, and influence work underway to develop and implement digital health solutions in BC. The project lifecycle below outlines the various stages of development we use to track and indicate the status of the various initiatives underway.

Digital Health Project Lifecycle

• Initiating 
• Planning 
• Implementing 
• Evaluating 
• Closing 

Doctors of BC Initiatives

Virtual Care

Virtual care, also referred to as telehealth, aims to create a more accessible and sustainable health care system throughout BC. Doctors of BC continues to collaborate with stakeholders  to develop standardized approaches to addressing and implementing solutions that reflect and address physician needs and concerns.

More information on virtual care solutions is available in the Doctors Technology Section of our website.

Access the virtual care toolkit.

See below for information on current projects/initiatives and their status.

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Remote patient monitoring

Telehomecare, or remote patient monitoring, enables health care providers to electronically monitor patients’ outside of conventional clinical settings, such as in a patient’s home.

Currently, the PHSA Office of Virtual Health has embarked on an RFP process with Canada Health Infoway to find new Remote Patient Monitoring solution(s) to better meet clinical needs, and have an ability to scale and expand.

Doctor’s of BC’s Digital Health Strategy team, will continue to collaborate with PHSA and Canada Health Infoway to ensure our member voices are heard during the process. If you are interested in being involved for this project, visit our Get Involved page.

Patient Summaries

A patient summary is a standardized set of basic clinical data that includes the most important health and care related facts required to ensure safe and secure health care. It’s comprised of a standardized collection of patient information- the necessary minimum and sufficient data to inform a patient’s treatment at a point of care. These include:

• Medications
• Allergies/ Intolerances
• Problems
• Immunizations
• Results
• Procedures

Patient summaries can help improve:

• Coordination of care and clinical workflow efficiencies
• Health outcomes and patient safety
• Patient and provider experiences
• Cross-jurisdictional patient flows

Clinical uses of patient summaries may include:

• Medical emergencies
• Unfamiliar provider at the point of care
• Coordination/transitions of care

BC patient summaries

In early 2021, the Shared Care Committee (SCC) funded a Patient Summaries Pilot Project in the Victoria and the South Island regions. A key objective of the project was to improve communication between community-  and hospital-based doctors in their shared care of in-hospital patients, The project successfully met this objective.

Related work is underway at a national level through Canada Health Infoway’s Patient Summaries project. Recognizing the need to build on BC-based lessons and for physician input on digital health solutions, Doctors of BC advocated for and facilitated physician participation in key review stages of Health Infoway’s work.

Below diagram shows the Doctor’s of BC’s roadmap of BC Patient Summaries.

For more information on the National Patient Summaries Project, visit Canada Health Infoway.

Ministry of Health BC Initiatives

EMR Interoperability

In collaboration with the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders, Doctors of BC’s Digital Health Strategy team is working towards enabling connection and communication across the health systems in BC.

Recently, Doctor’s of BC completed an EMR Survey to understand our members needs. Doctors of BC will use these findings to inform development of a provincial EMR Strategy. They will also guide our advocacy approach and our collaboration with provincial partners. We will continue to seek member input to understand BC doctors evolving priorities, including seeking more information from them on central supports for EMR contract negotiations and pricing.

CareConnect

CareConnect is British Columbia’s secure, view-only Electronic Health Record (EHR) that offers authorized care providers access to an integrated, provincial view of patient-centric information available 24/7 to support the delivery of patient care.

Gain access to encounters, provincial and community lab results, diagnostic imaging, clinical documents from both non-health authority and health authority sources, and provincial immunization records for patients within BC.

Doctors of BC’s Digital Health Strategy team has been working collaboratively with the CareConnect team to ensure all doctors’ needs are met and ensuring that doctors’ voices are heard in regards to the use of CareConnect.

• Access
  My.CARECONNECT

• Request Access to CareConnect
  Community-Based Access

• Request Access to CareConnect
  Health Authority Access

• More Information on CareConnect

Health Gateway

Health Gateway is a website that provides British Columbians with access to their health information. Health Gateway currently provides access to:

• Medication history
• Immunization records
• Health visits billed to BC MSP
• Special authority request status
• COVID-19 test results
• COVID-19 proof of vaccination
• Lab results *NEW as of June 2022*

Health Gateway is a provincial patient portal that provides patients with access to their health records for health care received anywhere in the province.

As new features are added regularly, input from patients, physicians, and other clinicians and providers will help to inform future expansion of information currently under consideration by the Health Gateway team (e.g., diagnostic imaging reports).

Pharmanet (e-prescribing)

The Ministry of Health and Doctors of BC are working to support the development and deployment of the provincial prescription management solution to community-based prescribers that enables a real-time, closed loop prescription management via the PharmaNet system, enhanced interdisciplinary communication, and supports team-based care (the “PPM Project”).