One of Canada’s fastest-growing tech firms is burnishing its ivy league-reputation with a new partnership to digitize electronic medical records (EMR) for a teaching college of Harvard Medical School.
NexJ Systems Inc. will work with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to create an online medical dashboard that will allow patients the ability to access and manage their own health records online. The project draws upon NexJ’s Connected Wellness platform, which offers several Web-based applications designed to facilitate collaboration between doctors and their patients. The apps include Health Coach and Chronic Disease Management.
NexJ is a Toronto-based firm focused on designing Web-based software solutions for large enterprises. The firm was noted by Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list last year. Its revenue increased by a whopping 29,161 per cent in five years, earning it the number four spot on Deloitte’s list.
Electronic medical records could help solve the problem of patients depending on doctors to share the most up-to-date information with each other. Having a single, online-accessible file means that the specialist treating you has the same information as your family doctor.
Beth Israel’s EMR system is called Passport to TRUST. It’s designed to enable two-way communication between physician and patient, with goals of reducing healthcare costs, avoiding errors, and improve the health of patients overall.
The path to EMR adoption has been a slow one in Canada. Experts watching the field have estimated full roll-out of such a system nation-wide is 20 years away. Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian ordered Cancer Care Ontario to move to an EMR system last October, after losing 7,000 paper-based paper records.
In 2009, just over one-third of Canadian doctors reported using EMR, compared to 90 per cent adoption rates in countries like Australia and the U.K.