Chair's Message – MyChartTM patient portal
Your patients will soon be accessing their hospital chart and results on line. Are you ready in your practice? Be aware that MyChartTM, the patient access portal is coming to Southwestern Ontario, and will probably be more widely available later this year.
This initiative has already been successfully implemented in Toronto by Sunnybrook hospital and University Health Network among others, and is currently being trialled in London at LHSC and SJHC with select patients.
MyChartTM is a patient portal through which patients will have access to results in their electronic chart. These results will include lab reports, imaging results, microbiology and pathology reports. At this time results are being posted with some delay, ranging from several days to three weeks, designed to give doctors a chance to see the results before the patient, and therefore be able to contact the patient ahead of time about sensitive reports. Patients could have access to all results, indicated above, posted through clinical connect for all hospitals in the Southwestern region. At this time, the only clinical notes that will be posted are discharge summaries created after October 2018.
Some doctors have expressed concern about this citing the demands to do more testing, and the time necessary to answer questions about results that are not clinically significant. However, the experience in Toronto has been positive, and more patient involvement in their own health care is to be encouraged.
More information is available about MyChartTM for Southwestern Ontario in the following patient portal project update.
As always, I welcome your feedback and questions at swetmore@uwo.ca or via Twitter @DOCSJW.
