The Ford government is beginning work to create a central, electronic system to manage medical records, a move it says is part of its broader plan to connect everyone with a primary care practitioner by 2029.

The policy is in its early stages, with officials reaching out to businesses and providers in Ontario to understand who might be interested in bidding on the proposal in the future and how much capacity they would have.

“We want to get rid of those cursed forms that you have to fill out every time you go to a different clinician,” Health Minister Sylvia Jones explained.

“[We want to] make sure we have a system that can communicate regardless of where we are. So, lab tests, hospitals, primary care providers, we need to make sure that all of those pieces together work. And that work will be ongoing with Supply Ontario.”

She said the key to the new system would be allowing information and documents to be seamlessly shared between different health-care systems and providers. If realized, it would allow hospitals, doctors, home care and other providers to all merge records for continuity of care.

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Jones said the system would be voluntary for patients to opt into.

The government said it is currently seeking vendors who can help manage its new electronic system. Jones said a “number of businesses” would be interested in bidding on the contract, but wouldn’t comment on the cost.

The announcement comes some 20-plus years after the government launched a system called eHealth, which mutated into a scandal.

Ontario began trying to create integrated electronic medical records for patients in the early 2000s, but in 2009, the then-Liberal health minister was forced to resign after the auditor general said the eHealth agency had spent $1 billion but had little to show for it. A followup report from the auditor general in 2016 said $8 billion had been spent to that point on various electronic health record initiatives.

Jones said her new plan would not suffer the same fate, pointing to work she said will take place with the integrity commissioner and the information and privacy commissioner in drafting the plan.

Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy also announced Thursday that next week’s provincial budget will include another $325 million for primary care, as Jones said the government is so far on track toward its goal of attaching everyone in the province to a primary care provider by 2029.

— with files from The Canadian Press

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