How will Connect Care be felt outside Connect Care?

A variety of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) facilitate primary and specialty healthcare where Connect Care is not the record of care. These physicians, clinics and networks will continue to manage the health information for the services they provide. Naturally, these physicians also wonder how the advent of Connect Care might affect their current and future opportunities for informational, relational and knowledge continuity.

Connect Care can positively impact non-Connect Care settings in a number of ways:

• Alberta's provincial Electronic Health Record, Netcare, which aggregates key health information and makes it available to authorized providers, is improved when Connect Care deploys because it gains a wider range of information from a single, standards-based, CIS source.
• "eDelivery" of health information from Connect Care and Netcare to EMRs is improved because a single CIS makes more information in a more consistent format easier for EMRs to capture and organize.
• New "Community Information Integration" (CII) and a "Central Patient Attachment Registry" (CPAR) initiatives jointly allow patients to be linked to a medical home, and for that home to share information with Netcare; extending sharing to include Connect Care as it rolls-out.
• A Connect Care Provider Portal provides access to the information that non-Connect Care prescribers need while also facilitating communication, notifications, referral and consultation, ordering and contributing to the Connect Care record.

Working together, Alberta's CIS, EHR, EMR, CII and CPAR help to defragment the health information space; bringing continuity to Albertans' experience of healthcare.

• FAQ: Evolving Alberta Health Information Landscape