Canadians seeing more doctors after hours but electronic medical-record use lags behind

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Dr. Megan Mahoney, centre, examines patient Consuelo Castaneda, right, as medical scribe Anu Tirapasur documents the visit in Stanford, Calif. Less than half of Canadian family doctors routinely used electronic medical records to support their quality-of-care decisions, according to a new report. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

(Canadian Press) — Family doctors in Canada are providing increased access to care compared with most of their counterparts in 10 other countries but still lag behind when it comes to using electronic medical records, findings of a survey show.

The Commonwealth Fund Survey also found few doctors can share patients’ lab and diagnostic test results because health systems are not fully connected.

It involved over 13,000 doctors, 2,500 of them from Canada, and was the basis of a report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Physicians from Germany, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden also participated in the 2019 survey, which showed doctors in all the countries saw an average of 99 patients a week. (…)

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