Canada’s TELUS Health is launching MedDialog, a national clinical solution that allows doctors to communicate electronically with other physicians regarding the care of their patients directly from their electronic medical record (EMR) systems. The technology promises to deliver more efficient clinical practice and better patient care by eliminating the need for phone and fax communications, while ensuring that all communication history, such as referrals, specialist consultations, laboratory testing results and other patient information, remains within the digital chart.
Using MedDialog, physicians can have conversations with one another, relating to the care of a patient, in a more efficient manner. This not only saves the physician valuable time which could be spent with patients, but also has the potential to eliminate fatal medical errors.
“MedDialog is built on the capabilities of the TELUS Health Exchange platform, an open and vendor-agnostic solution that fosters collaboration and more efficient and effective healthcare for the benefit of patients,” Michael Guerriere, Chief Medical Officer of TELUS Health, said in a statement. “The launch of MedDialog advances our vision that to improve patient outcomes we must harness the power of technology to enable a fully connected health ecosystem.”
MedDialog will be launched in the Ottawa region where it will digitally connect more than 560 physicians using TELUS Health’s PS Suite and Med Access EMRs. The solution will be added to other TELUS Health EMRs across the country through the end of 2018 to create a national messaging solution. Eventually, it will evolve to connect all 20,000 physicians using TELUS EMRs and be integrated with other software vendors to enable communication with physicians using other EMR platforms.
Today, more than 73 percent of physicians use EMRs to maintain patient clinical notes. MedDialog will ensure that all patient communications are electronically stored within an EMR chart so physicians have a full medical history and can ensure that all patient data transmissions follow best practices for privacy and security.