P.E.I. telehealth expansion will provide digital link to home care clients

A three-year plan to expand telehealth services on P.E.I. will provide a link between health-care practitioners and home-care clients, allowing nurses to monitor clients remotely in real time, and allowing seniors to ask questions or request prescription renewals using a secure messaging service.

The details are from the province's virtual care action plan, prepared by Gevity Consulting Inc. The document was tabled by Health Minister Ernie Hudson during the spring sitting of the P.E.I. legislature.

According to the report, its implementation will allow the province to "consolidate and secure the many recent successes and advances in the use of virtual care in Prince Edward Island while also expanding the scope and scale of virtual care" used in the province.

The plan calls for $5.4 million in funding over the next three years to pay for infrastructure & supports. The province has so far announced $3.5 million in spending for this fiscal year, with funding from the federal government.

The three-year plan also calls for the implementation of a single software platform to be used for out-of-province virtual care, expected to allow for more virtual consults for Islanders with specialists on the mainland and thus fewer trips off-Island.

Under the plan, out-of-province health-care providers could be provided access to P.E.I.'s electronic medical records system which Hudson told the legislature should come online in the fall of 2021 and link their reports directly into those records.

The system would also allow specialists who make periodic visits to P.E.I. to see their clients virtually for follow-up appointments.

The report notes that usage of virtual care in P.E.I. "increased dramatically during the pandemic," but states it's difficult to draw long-term conclusions from the numbers in terms of how services might be used post-COVID.

"Throughout the pandemic, we have seen a lot of success in telehealth technology and virtual care supporting Island patients and received a lot of positive feedback from those who have used the service," Hudson said in a media release issued in February announcing the telehealth funding.

But the report's authors also noted a lack of standard policies or processes among the province's current virtual care service offerings, along with an "inconsistent informal and ad hoc" approach to training clinical users.

Hudson also tabled in the legislature the contract with Gevity Consulting to produce the action plan, showing the company was to be paid a maximum of $63,333.44.

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