We are fortunate to reside in a country where healthcare is largely government funded. While there are obviously ways that it can be improved, the system does largely work and permits, for example, patients to freely schedule an appointment to see their physician in almost all situations, without needing to worry about the need for payment (or co-payment).
A significant challenge that arises in this situation is how to deal with appointment no-shows and late cancellations. Both situations are troublesome because the net effect is that another patient who could have likely used that appointment time-slot to see their physician could not. In the aggregate, for some clinics, up to 10 - 15% of all appointments are "wasted" in this way. This is bad for patient care and an incredibly inefficient use of health care resources.
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A frequent question that arises relates to travelling, and what vaccines are needed and/or recommended when travelling to various parts of the world.
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Check out how we’ve been improving our vaccine fridge temperature maintenance with a Temperature Controller. Yes, we realize these Temperature Controllers are used to brew beer as well.
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An issue that occasionally arises, as it does with every community family doctor's office, is how to meet the needs of patients in respect of urgent medical issues. While not every medical issue is urgent, it's of course understandable that when a pressing matter arises, that it would be best if their own family doctor or a colleague were available at a convenient time.
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The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada released a new policy statement on Saturated Fats. Boiling the statement down (pardon the pun):
- Eat fresh food.
- Make your own food.
- Eat things that look like food.
- Eat fewer “highly processed foods”… like “confectionaries, sugary drinks, processed meats, and snack foods.”
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Procuring technology is unfortunately hard. When selecting a vendor, we need to balance a variety of considerations, including features, security, uptime, customer support, quality of UI/UX, etc...
When it came to our online booking system, we went with Veribook for a number of reasons. One limitation, however, was their lack of a mobile friendly booking page for our patients. This has been a source of understandable frustration for everyone.
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We've been meaning to share more about CHIME, our tablet-based system for helping our clinic work far more effectively as it's been an interesting journey from idea to deployment.
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Having children is a part of life. It's trite to say that it's never easy for any parent, but our perspective is that it's particularly difficult to manage for family physicians in the community for a number of reasons.
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Magenta Health is proud to feature the original art of flutist and music producer Laura Nashman – 21 original pieces grace our reception area, hallways, and examination rooms.
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We understand that people live busy lives and that’s it’s hard to find time for physical activity. That’s why we like to promote small changes and small adjustments. They are easier to start and have a greater chance of sticking!
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In this next post in our series, we talk about faxing. It's apparently been around since 1964, and, stepping back for a moment, it's absolutely unbelievable that over 50 years later, much of the Canadian medical community still communicates largely by fax.
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A question occasionally arises as to how Magenta Health physicians are compensated by OHIP for the medical care that they provide.
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If you spend all day staring at a monitor, we strongly believe that it’s worth getting one suitable for your needs. Chefs take care of their knives, surgeons have fancy spider robots, family doctors - we probably use a computer more than any other tool.
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One of the most common frustrations for patients is when their doctor is late for an appointment. This is something that we try to minimize as much as possible, but unfortunately, we don't have a way to entirely eliminate this problem.
Nevertheless, we're believers in being transparent when it comes to issues such as this. If we can't fully solve the problem, at least we can try to communicate why this is happening, and what we're doing to minimize this problem.
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The relationship between our technology use and patient communication policies, and our ability to care for patients who have limited access to technology is a thorny issue. Providing accessible health care is one of our priorities, so our use of technology is something that we grappled with at length prior to proceeding as we have.
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To follow up on last week's post discussing phone systems and VoIP generally, the obvious question is what physical technology is needed to use a feature-rich VoIP provider such as voip.ms
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As a technology focused clinic, we're oftentimes asked by other small businesses and start-ups for technology related recommendations. Sometimes it's health care related; sometimes it's not.
This is the start of #TuesdayTechTips - a series of weekly (*hopefully) posts where we'll share our research and experiences.
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