Electronic Health Records (EHR)

The Health integration Platform connects pharmacists, physicians and other healthcare professionals while providing access to patient information. It enables patient data to be shared between providers and across care settings.

Benefits of the Health Integration Platform

• Comprehensive view of patient medical history
• Information at health teams’ fingertips
• Facilitation of collaboration between different healthcare settings
• Efficient coordination of time, people and resources
• Rapid flow of information
• Connection of systems involved in EHRs, including registries, data warehouses, repositories, clinical systems and points-of-service
• Delivery of messages between components and users through a standard set of interfaces

Information sharing

Sharing patient health data can be a challenge – but access to vital information can make all the difference in patient care. This means not only having applications available to electronically share critical patient information, but also a reliable infrastructure to support all of these tools.

The backbone of EHRs

Providing the functionality of the Health Information Access Layer (HIAL) as defined by Canada Health Infoway – the backbone of EHRs – the TELUS Health Integration Platform enables patient data to be shared between providers and across care settings. Key HIAL services include:

• Communications
• Consent and terminology
• Orchestration
• EHR Index

Interaction management

Architected and built by TELUS Health, the platform manages interactions between clinical systems such as pharmacy management systems, hospital information systems, physicians, and Electronic Medical Records (EMR); provincial repositories, such as drug, lab, and shared health records; and provincial registries, such as client, provider, location and user.

One set of messaging interfaces

Through a service-oriented architecture, the platform links disparate eHealth systems together so they can exchange information through one set of messaging interfaces. With this standards-based approach, the platform connects EHR domains and registries while promoting the security and privacy of patient information.

Built for flexibility

Configurable and extensible, the TELUS Health Integration Platform aims to support both current and future medical systems that benefit from being connected to EHRs, such as labs, hospitals, pharmacy management software and EMR software.

With the Drug Information System, healthcare professionals can see an accurate medication profile for a patient. This digital solution lets physicians, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals access a patient’s complete drug profile. The TELUS Drug Information System is powered by the Catamaran Corporation.

Challenges faced by providers

Without the Drug Information System, physicians have access to information on medications they alone have prescribed, as well as details provided by the patient.

In advanced settings, where multiple physicians treating a patient access and update a common electronic medical record, medications prescribed outside the organization still may be missing.

Pharmacists can also face challenges as they typically only have access to the medications dispensed at their specific pharmacy.

Benefits of the Drug Information System

• Supports initiatives to reduce the potential of adverse drug events as patient profiles include information on allergies, intolerances, vaccinations, contraindications and clinical observations
• Access to a single repository of all the drugs that have been prescribed, regardless of prescriber or dispensing site, for all patients
• A complete history that physicians and pharmacists can access to help them spot potentially dangerous drug interactions
• Provides increased information to pharmacists and prescribers which may help reduce calls to doctors to check prescriptions