Ontario tests province-wide access to DI reports

TORONTO – eHealth Ontario announced that more than 100 healthcare providers will take part in a limited production release of the Diagnostic Imaging (DI) Common Service. The initiative will enable the sharing and viewing of patients’ diagnostic reports from across Ontario, to hospital and community-based healthcare providers anytime, anywhere.

The first deployment of this initiative, scheduled for this summer, will enable healthcare 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 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.

eHealth Ontario’s privacy office ensures that the electronic exchange of PHI among patients and healthcare 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.