Ever been put on hold while trying to make an appointment with your doctor? Or had to skip work to attend one? Or ended up in a hospital emergency room because you couldn’t get an appointment at all?

If so, you’ll appreciate the shot of technological innovation that Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott plans to inject into the province’s health care system.

Elliott announced this week that more Ontarians will be able to have “video visits” with their doctors over the next year via their own computers and smart phones. They’ll also be able to book appointments online.

She also promised patients better access to their own health care records and a change in privacy regulations that will mean health care providers can access patients’ full online records.

This, she said, will help health care professionals provide patients with more “integrated” care.

These changes are long overdue. After all, anything that can prevent patients from ending up in the emergency room because they couldn’t get an appointment with a doctor is a good thing.

Still, they won’t go far toward what the Ford government has said is its biggest health care challenge: ending so-called hallway medicine.

There are three much bigger issues the government needs to tackle to reduce the average wait time to be admitted to hospital from an emergency department. It now tops a sickening 16 hours.

Those are a lack of nursing home and long-term health care beds and a shortage of home-care services.

And they won’t be solved by the $3 million the province plans to spend on video visits and other digital innovations.

If anything, the problem of overcrowded hospitals and hallway medicine is getting worse, not better.

The organization Home Care Ontario says that each day 15 per cent of hospital beds are occupied by about 3,000 patients who no longer require a hospital stay but have no where else to go for their care. That means longer wait times for patients who really need those beds.

And while the government promised $11 million more in funding for home and community care last September, it has yet to even scratch the surface on the need for long-term care beds.

Right now, for example, more than 36,000 seniors are waiting to move into long-term care homes. Yet the government opened only 21 new nursing home beds in the first year of its mandate.

That’s an awfully long way from the additional 55,000 nursing home beds the province’s Financial Accountability Office says will be needed by 2034 just to maintain waiting lists at current levels.

None of this is to say using technology to connect patients with doctors isn’t a good idea that can help reduce emergency room visits.

Indeed, the Ontario Telemedicine Network has been facilitating video connections between patients and doctors in northern and rural communities for more than a decade.

So it’s long past the time to make it possible for urban doctors to provide this service, too, and be paid for it.

Further, there’s no doubt about the value of an information sharing system that will enable doctors to better track patients with chronic diseases and catch medical problems before they become more serious.

Still, the province must carefully handle how the new technology is introduced. There’s a real risk that some patients will be tempted to treat it as a means to check in with their doctor for every minor complaint; if that’s allowed to happen, costs will skyrocket.

So yes, kudos are in order to Elliott for opening the door to new technologies that will make patients’ lives easier.

But her priority must still be tackling the bigger problems that are the main causes of “hallway medicine.”

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/11/14/video-visits-with-doctors-are-a-smart-idea.html