NS delays start of provincial EHR system

HALIFAX – The rollout of a new $365-million electronic medical records system for Nova Scotia is being pushed back until December. In a memo to staff earlier this month, Dr. Nicole Boutilier (pictured), executive vice-president of medicine for Nova Scotia Health, said officials have been re-evaluating the status of the clinical information system.

“This is not uncommon when building a system as significant as the [One Person One Record system],” she writes, adding that the design and build of the new medical records system will be completed this summer.

One Person One Record, or OPOR, will allow healthcare professionals anywhere in the province to see what’s happening in real time with a patient who’s entered the acute-care system.

In a note from January, Boutilier said the system was on track to go live at the IWK Health Centre at the end of August, with a second wave at five additional hospital sites to follow in November, CBC New reported. (It said the Halifax Examiner first reported on the delay.)

Officials have not provided an explicit explanation for the delay. Interview requests for officials with the IWK and the Health Department were declined.

In her memo, Boutilier writes that the first site to use the new system will be the IWK, and it is now scheduled to begin on Dec. 6.

When health minister Michelle Thompson first announced the deal in February 2023 with Oracle Cerner Canada, a division of U.S.-based tech giant Oracle Corp., the expectation was that OPOR would begin a staged rollout within two years.

The decision to delay means further impacts to launch dates, as the second wave was supposed to begin Nov. 22. Officials are still determining the plan for Nova Scotia Health sites and zones as a result of the decision to push back the start of the first wave.

When it’s complete, One Person One Record will replace or connect more than 80 systems that healthcare professionals use to view and record patient information. The problem has been that many of those systems do not or cannot communicate with each other.

A Health Department spokesperson said that healthcare professionals must use an average of five systems to gain a full picture of a patient’s health information.

The spokesperson said the budget for the project remains unchanged. The province has yet to reveal details about operating costs.

In a statement, an IWK spokesperson said “great progress has been made” but the start date was adjusted to allow for more training and preparation time.

The president-elect of Doctors Nova Scotia said delays in a project of this scope are not unexpected.

“Implementing a modern hospital-based clinical information system is a large undertaking and will be foundational to improved patient care,” Dr. Shelly McNeil said in a statement.

“We know that everyone is working hard to implement OPOR and while we would like to see the timelines met, it’s vitally important that OPOR is implemented well.”