Just one day after the Ontario Medical Association spoke about the need to attract more family doctors, the Ontario government has announced plans that would allow physicians to reduce paperwork and spend more time with their patients.
This includes a change that will do away with the idea of doctor's providing sick notes for short-term medical absences.
“Our government is making common sense changes that will reduce the administrative burden on family doctors so that they can spend more time caring for patients instead of doing duplicative or unnecessary paperwork,” said Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones in a news release.
The writing of sick notes has been described as one of the many paperwork burdens that often ties up the time of physicians when they could otherwise be working with patients. It was almost a year ago that similar legislation was passed in Nova Scotia.
Ontario said it will be amending the Employment Standards Act so that employees will not be required to provide a doctor's note to verify up to three days of sick time off. The new change has limits. Workers could still be required to provide sick notes for any sick days that go beyond the three days allowed by Ontario law.
In order to maintain accountability, employees who take sick time may be asked to state and/or sign an attestation. Employers will also retain the right to require accountability such as a receipt for over-the-counter medication.
The province said the move to put patients before paperwork will free up to 95,000 hours annually for physicians to put back into their practices caring for patients.
The province is also expanding an innovative program to more than 150 primary care providers that can safely use artificial intelligence to automatically summarise or transcribe conversations with their patients who consent into electronic medical notes. This will result in a better patient experience and more accurate records, said the ministry news release.
The changes will also discourage the use of fax machines in favour of expanding eServices to digitize more referral and consultation forms so they can be conveniently shared electronically in a timely manner to obtain specialist advice, said the release. In some cases this could eliminate the need for an in-person specialist visit entirely, said the release.
The province said it would also be working with the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) to streamline and simplify 12 key government medical forms that are burdensome, as well as digitizing and integrating more forms into electronic medical records.