Canadian Institute of Health Information<\/a> identifying Ontario as the province with the \u201cshortest wait times for critical surgeries and procedures\u2014such as MRI scans or hip and knee surgery.\u201d <\/p>\n\u201cThrough our government\u2019s record investments in our health care system, we are continuing to build on this progress by enhancing digital tools and adding hundreds of thousands more diagnostic imaging and surgical procedures to connect people to the care they need, when they need it,\u201d she said in a written statement emailed to CP24.<\/p>\n
Dr. Zainab Abdurrahman, the president of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), said the new data released by Statistic Canada this week highlights the need for a centralized referral database in the province that would streamline the process for referring physicians.<\/p>\n
The system, she said, would allow physicians to filter by unique specialization as well as the distance the patient is willing to travel.<\/p>\n
\u201c(It would) be able to include all the information so that it can be triaged appropriately\u2026 because obviously there are some conditions that do need to be seen faster.\u201d<\/p>\n
She noted that referring physicians wouldn\u2019t have to spend so much time searching for the right specialist to refer to. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou might not know who to refer to, and your physician is spending forever on a WhatsApp group asking people online, trying to find who does this,\u201d Abdurrahman said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to cut that part out, because triaging is happening, but you need to get the right people, to the right place, to triage.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said a considerable amount of funding is required to create this type of centralized system. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe need the government to also participate in terms of helping us with funding, creation, but co-creating when it comes to how to make this functional and to make it worthwhile because we need to make sure that it makes sense for physicians to use a system like this,\u201d Abdurrahman said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to just create something that then isn\u2019t helpful\u2026 that\u2019s the last thing we want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New data from Statistics Canada shows that a little over a third of Ontario residents who sought an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[712,49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-39217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}