For years, NWT residents who ended up in Alberta for medical treatment faced all kinds of obstacles accessing their records. Officials say that’s changing.
In a Thursday news release, the NWT and Alberta governments said residents of the territory aged 14 and over can now create a MyHealth Alberta account, giving them access to records created in Alberta.
The governments said about 8,400 NWT residents received some form of healthcare service in Alberta last year.
NWT health minister Lesa Semmler called the change “an important step forward.”
This page of the MyHealth Alberta website explains NWT resident eligibility and how to sign up.
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For years, patients have described to Cabin Radio the chaos created by the inability of the Alberta and NWT medical record systems to seamlessly work together.
One Yellowknife resident described having to call an office in Edmonton, have them print lab results and fax them to Yellowknife healthcare staff, then call the Yellowknife clinic “and either drive to get a paper copy or have them read them out loud over the phone.”
The NWT is in the process of updating its own electronic medical records system.
Thursday’s news release did not appear to contain solutions to other challenges involving medical records, such as how records are shared between healthcare workers of multiple jurisdictions, or how some NWT records reach Alberta physicians. (The NWT has experimented with QR codes for some patients’ records.)
The current lack of an online patient portal in the NWT was a key problem highlighted in a recent report on health privacy legislation.
