IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

City Coun. Vince Bucci was the lone vote against the only recommendation to come out of last week's first meeting of the joint committee.

After an hour of opening remarks, which saw all six members of the committee discuss their expectations, a majority agreed to ask for a staff report listing the services each municipality provides, which will be presented at the committee's next meeting in January.

Google's sister firm Sidewalk Labs has scrapped a plan to build a smart city in Canada, citing complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

For several years it had pursued ambitions to build a digital-first city in Toronto "from the internet up".

Chief executive Dan Doctoroff blamed "unprecedented economic uncertainty" for abandoning the plan.

The city is partnering with Sudbury Regional Hospital to develop the project concept -- a large and secure data storage centre that would provide a wealth of economic opportunities for the city, according a staff report.

"The hospital has been cited numerous times for its leadership with this initiative and, due to its success, has secured a positive reputation in the emerging eHealth arena," the report says.

Trauma patients across Ontario now have access to a neurosurgeon 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Emergency Neuro Image Transfer System (ENITS) is a centralized e-Health online consultation system that makes remote neuro-consultations easier, faster and more accurate. Hospitals across the province send head scan images to ENITS where they can be accessed and reviewed by neurosurgeons anytime, anywhere.

In 2009, eHealth funded eCare Kenora, a $339,000 initiative to connect three sites within the family health team and another between the Paterson Medical Centre and the laboratory at the hospital. While the family health team has been successful in establishing its network, the bridge between the doctors and the hospital is out.

Second annual Beyond Digital Transformation in Sudbury talks tech for the sake of human lives

The digital transformation is not as much about tech, as it is about people.

The overlying theme at the second annual Beyond Digital Transformation conference was on how it is transforming mining for the greater good of the people that work in it.

St. Joseph’s in Toronto was the final piece of the 100-hospital puzzle that allows doctors to transfer scans instead of people, making diagnosing brain injuries simpler for patients, their families, and physicians.

Due to the limited number of neurosurgeons in the province, patients needed to be transferred from remote communities to larger hospitals for everything from their initial consultation to final treatment.

The expansion of access to records on devices such as iPhones “brings effective, fast, secure and safe decision-making ability right to the bedside at any time, day or night,” the Hamilton Niagara Haldimand Brant (HNHB) Local Health Integration Network announced Friday.

The research, conducted in Ontario, Canada, involved a secure, regional web-based e-consultation service called Champlain BASE (Building Access to Specialists through e-consultation), which included a robust firewall and granular access controls.

More than 12,000 records were shipped electronically during a six-month pilot project involving the Ottawa Hospital, the Upper Canada and Osgoode Family Health Teams and the Southeast and Champlain Local Health Integration Networks (LHINS).

"We've shown we can move this information quickly, safely and securely," project manager Rowland Taylor told The Recorder and Times during a conference call Thursday.

EHealth is the gift that keeps on giving, the kiss of death in a field that is supposed to save lives. Brace yourself, in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 6 vote, for yet more reruns of the “billion-dollar-boondoggle” attack line.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford used that catchphrase to devastating effect against his opponent in the city’s mayoral election — former provincial health minister George Smitherman, who carried much of the baggage for the eHealth fiasco. But like that other Ford slogan — “ending the gravy train at city hall” — the billion-dollar-boondoggle allegation doesn’t quite add up.

The Tories say they are not against electronic records but if they form government Oct. 6 they will proceed with a public inquiry into the $1 billion spending scandal, says a senior party staffer.

Matthews held an eHealth progress report on Friday. It is the latest of several “reality checks” the Liberals have staged in order to bring attention to their record on a number of files such as green energy, the economy and education.

“The implementation of the DR in the fall of 2011 is an important step toward achieving province-wide electronic health records (EHRs) for Ontarians,” the web site said, prior to a major overhaul launched at the end of June.

Which it would have been, had it been true.

ConnectingGTA, which will be implemented by 2013 at a cost of $72 million, will allow 700 service providers to securely share patient health information online.

Currently health records can be shared in silos within the system, but they are not available in one place, creating an extra step for doctors that can delay diagnosis and treatment.

"EHealth in its current form has been a disaster," he told The Canadian Press.

He's right on that score, but guess what? Back in 2003, before the Liberals took office, there was something called the Smart Systems for Health Agency. It was a Tory initiative, which was also supposed to do the same thing, in a different way, with a different name. It was a disaster, too.

Despite problems that arose as eHealth Ontario tried to set up a provincewide system, medical officials such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists in Waterloo Region, Wellington County and Hamilton are now able to help their patients by sharing information through a computer network. Called ClinicalConnect, the network is a secure online portal.

The program started at the Hamilton local health network and expanded to include the Niagara-Haldimand-Brant area and Waterloo-Wellington. At present, 2,500 health care providers and 28 hospitals are able to use it.

The arrival of the Physician Office Integration program means the records of more than 150,000 patients will follow them almost anywhere they seek treatment in Northwestern Ontario, fed directly from the region’s 12 hospitals to more than 25 area clinics, representing 168 physicians and nurse practitioners.

Toronto needs rules and regulations to govern the collection and managing of data from smart cities including the one Sidewalk Labs has in mind, says a city councillor who has launched a plan calling for a new policy.

Councillor Joe Cressy, whose ward covers Quayside — the parcel of land Sidewalk Labs wants to turn into a tech-driven residential neighbourhood complete with sensors and other digital devices — wants to see a citywide public consultation launched to gather input on what the new “data governance principles” should look like and how they can be applied to the Quayside project.

The equipment is expected to help identify when one of the estimated 15,000 people who have voluntarily excluded themselves from Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation sites enters an OLG gaming site, an OLG representative said.

The new system “couldn’t come soon enough,” said Michelle Nogueira, an addictions counsellor at Homewood Health Centre.

Hundreds of employees at the electronic health records agency were promised merit increases of 1.9 per cent and bonuses averaging 7.8 per cent this year, despite a Liberal government order to freeze public sector wages for two years.

After the planned increases were reported in March, Health Minister Deb Matthews told the eHealth board to take another look at the plan in light of the government's wage freeze, which was announced in the 2010 budget to deal with a deficit now at $16 billion.