No access to Alberta app for NWT?

YELLOWKNIFE, NWT – Residents of the Northwest Territories sometimes travel to Alberta for care, but it seems they can’t make use of Alberta’s healthcare app to check on their data. NWT residents receiving care in Alberta can’t access information through the province’s dedicated app because of what one patient calls “absurd bureaucratic barriers,” reports Cabin Radio, a news service.

For the past three years, Yellowknifer Kira Young has made at least eight trips to see an Alberta specialist through both medevacs and planned medical travel.

Going to Alberta for care “is a bit of an ordeal for everyone every time,” she said, and the difficulty of accessing her medical information makes it even more of a struggle.

Alberta residents have access to an app called MyAHS Connect, a “patient portal” that lets people see their test results, communicate with their doctor and get answers to medical questions.

Young heard about MyAHS Connect on one of her first hospital visits in Edmonton, where she and her mom learned that other patients were using it to access their medical records and lab results. Young couldn’t do the same because the app required an Alberta photo ID.

“We contacted the administrators of the portal and we were told that there is absolutely no way to get around this barrier,” Young said.  “You have to have an Alberta photo ID to access MyAHS Connect.”

She said she has contacted “all kinds of people in Alberta Health Services administration” to get access to the portal. She gets the same message every time: “This is a policy barrier, there’s no way to work around it.”

Instead, Young has to call an office in Edmonton, have them print the lab results and fax them to Yellowknife healthcare staff, and then call the Yellowknife clinic “and either drive to get a paper copy or have them read them out loud over the phone, which is clearly not ideal for anyone.”

The problem is compounded by the incompatibility of medical record systems in the Northwest Territories and Alberta.

“My doctors in the Northwest Territories can’t access any of my lab results from Alberta unless I have them sent across the border and vice versa,” said Young.

That leaves Young and her parents to compile all of her lab results from the NWT and Alberta themselves. “There’s no one else that can do it because of these absurd bureaucratic barriers,” she said.

Young, who says the current system is as much a burden on healthcare workers as it is on patients, has written to the health ministers of the NWT and Alberta. In the letter, she requests access to MyAHS Connect for NWT residents, telling the ministers such access “can make a huge difference for patients like me.”

She sent the letter on August 21. As of September 5, she said she had not received a response.

Asked if NWT patients can expect things to change, an Alberta Health Services representative said by email that the province and territory were “exploring options to extend access.” No timeline for that process was provided.

“In the meantime, patients can request their health records through the Request for Information (ROI) process,” the province added – a process that can take up to a month at a time.

As part of a broader interview about challenges facing the NWT’s healthcare system, territorial health authority boss Kim Riles (pictured) acknowledged her agency is “a stakeholder” in work to modernize the territory’s electronic medical records and patient access to them.

Riles said work on a new system is “in the scoping phase” where the people involved are deciding what they want the system to do and what patients want to be prioritized.

“There’s lots of opportunity at this point for all of those things to be on the table,” Riles said, referring to requests for easier patient access and compatibility with Alberta.

She acknowledged that such requests had been coming “for many years.”

“Those functionalities are certainly ones that are being considered,” said Riles.

“Platforms like MyAHS Connect are really supposed to empower patients and streamline healthcare,” Young said, but from her perspective the app has simply created “a bigger barrier and a lot more bureaucratic challenges.”

Medical travel is hard enough in the first place, she added.

“Compounding it with not only incompatible electronic medical record systems, but also this patient portal, is a really big ask for patients who are already dealing with health struggles and medical travel.”