IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

The City of North Bay will be launching their eServices Portal on Tuesday, June 30th, 2015.

The Portal will allow citizens to register and then have access to their water meter consumption information and a water bill estimator. It is important to note that by registering online, every citizen has the opportunity to view and monitor their daily water consumption and to check for any unknown leaks.

eHealth Ontario is working on a strategy to provide electronic medical records (EMR) for all Ontarians by 2015.

But Dr. Kunwar Singh says converting 42 years of his patient files from ink into bytes will be too costly and time consuming.

The Ottawa Hospital will "develop and change" its electronic medical record system to bridge the information gap between clinics with an in-fusion of cash from Canada Health Infoway, according to the hospital's chief information officer.

The hospital funded its own sys-tem with a focus on in-patients, Dr. Glen Geiger said in a Thursday interview, but will now expand it to include outpatients thanks to the hospital's share of $100 million that will be divided among 19 outpatient electronic medical record projects across the country.

Doctors use iPads for interactive bedside checkups, explaining a diagnosis with digital images of X-Rays, MRIs or other test results. A patient's full medical file can be pulled up on the iPad, as well as pages from reference books and other medical resources that a doctor might have pulled off a bookshelf in the old days.

Observers might notice the custom-made lab coats sported by doctors, which have extra-large pockets sized to hold their iPads.

Someone I know went to a Nepean clinic the other day, and when she finally saw a doctor almost four hours later, he was on a "TV" talking to her from Toronto.

The patient, my daughter, didn't know what to make of this bizarre encounter. I had heard of "telemedicine," but thought it only served people living in remote areas, such as northwestern Ontario, where a patient is linked by video to a doctor hundreds of kilometres away.

The County Information Systems department has been providing daily IT (information technology) support to the Town of Tillsonburg since October 2012 while the Town assesses its long-term IT needs. The technician serving Tillsonburg will be recruited by the County to provide on-site, day-to-day support to Town staff, although the Town will still retain the benefit of the different areas of expertise represented in the County’s Information Systems department. All IT services delivered under the shared services agreement will be provided to Tillsonburg on a cost recovery basis.

“The biggest workforce in health care is patients,” argued Dr. Michael Evans, a family physician who runs the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. “Technology has to enable patient education.”

"It's a really good place to learn," Tait says, "which makes it perfect for younger people especially. You get exposure to a broad variety of roles and can gain a good foothold in the IT industry."

However, if the cost issues are set aside for a moment, eHealth is making some strides in improving health care. One example is a medical record-sharing system being implemented throughout the South West Local Health Improvement Network.

SPIRE -- for Southwest Physician Interface to Regional Electronic Medical Record -- sends digital files of hospital-generated lab results, diagnostic images and transcribed reports directly to a patient's family doctor to be entered automatically in patients' files.

"We are actively a profit centre for the government," said Dr. Ed Brown, founder and CEO of the OTN Friday at the first-ever Northern Telemedicine Forum, held at Sault College in Sault Ste. Marie, attended by health care providers from across northeastern Ontario and, via videoconference, from the northwest.

Since it was launched just five years ago, OTN has set up more than 1,200 sites across the province, including hospitals and primary care clinics, with two-way videoconferencing. A full quarter of these sites are in Northern Ontario, though we have only 6% of the population.

The Ontario transit services company is working with Cubic Transportation Systems to deliver the Umo mobility fare payments platform to improve convenience and access to public transit.

Sault Ste Marie Transit Services has selected Cubic Transportation Systems to install its Umo mobility platform on buses serving the city of Sault Ste Marie.

City council will decide Monday whether to move forward with a Smart City technology pilot projet.

City council will be asked Monday to enter into an agreement with PUC Services to participate in a pilot project for Smart City technology.

Smart City technology has been on the radar to establish Smart City sensors on existing and new LED streetlights, including radar sensors as part of the Smart City strategy, a report to council states.

On a plot of land that once served as a stark reminder of how quickly a promising tech sector can go bust, a new facility is paving the way for cutting-edge products that could fundamentally change how residents move about the capital.

The 16-kilometre test track for self-driving cars is located on a 1,866-acre site just off Woodroffe Avenue across from the Nepean Sportsplex. In the early 2000s, the area housed an incubation centre for biotechnology startups, a venture that ultimately became a casualty of the dot-com bust.

Windsor's partnership with Ford will provide the city with data gathered from AI and machine learning to predict and prevent traffic accident hotspots.

The Ford Motor Company continues its commitment to developing smart cities across the globe. Last week, Ford was one of four car companies to announce a partnership with Samsung to enable a digital car key through Samsung's Galaxy S21 series phones. Now, Windsor, Ontario, is the first Canadian city to partner with the Ford Safety insights Platform (FSIP), a business line within the Ford Motor Company.

Smartphones may become a must for London surgeons sent to retrieve organs for transplant surgery after a Blackberry Bold was used to secure a liver for a patient dying in London.

The clock was ticking when two London surgeons and a transplant co-ordinator from London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) were dispatched out of town to remove a liver from a middle-aged man who had sustained brain death from a head trauma.

Telemedicine is a television screen on a stand that has cameras attached, plus a digital stethoscope, to share information with specialists in wound care, ear, eyes and throat, and skin conditions. The program allows people to meet with out-of-town doctors at the West Parry Sound Health Centre (WPSHC), saving them a trips to offices in Sudbury, Toronto and other sites.

Parry Sound was already a heavy user of the system, but now it’s being utilized even more, said officials.

Other types of predictive technologies have been created to evaluate weather, traffic, crime, epidemiology and more. In each case, data is evaluated for patterns so that past trends can be used to predict probable future trends.

The city’s elected officials are pushing back against conspiracy theorists with claims about the 15-minute city and smart cities planning concepts

Fuelled by misinformation, local conspiracy theorists have expanded their scope beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on another convoluted web of misinformation.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know this way is easier,” said Burk’s Falls Family Heath Team patient Shirley Taylor of Sundridge. “If I couldn’t come here and talk to my specialist in Sudbury, I would have to drive all the way to Sudbury for a five-minute appointment.”

Thanks to the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) in Burk’s Falls, Taylor is able to see and speak to her doctor electronically rather than make the trek north.

More residents living in the Central East LHIN will benefit from specialist care closer to home as the LHIN supports its health service providers to recruit 20 new telemedicine nurses to expand care delivery.

For patients this will mean improved access to health care, less travel and an increase in the types of health care services available at more than 80 telemedicine sites across the LHIN’s Scarborough, Durham and North East clusters.