Project Organization
For patients, the new hospital information system is a first step towards creating a provincial Electronic Health Record (EHR) for every Nova Scotian. Care providers across 34 hospitals now have easier, faster, and secure access to relevant aspects of their patients' medical history. Patients receiving care in any of these facilities no longer have to repeat the same medical history over and over again, which used to be required even within the same hospital.
Health professionals in these hospitals can now be more effective and efficient because they have access to their patients' information, regardless of which hospital provided the services. When a doctor enters a prescription directly into the system, there is less chance of clinical error due to transmission and interpretation errors.
Nova Scotia will be the first province in Canada to implement a single-integrated hospital information system. The system will be implemented in 34 hospitals across 8 different districts and will support over 6000 staff across the province. Plans also include links to systems in place in the Capital Health District and the IWK Health Centre. Over 200 doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, patient administrators, academics, and other subject matter experts are involved in the project.