You may have wondered if the day would come when you would see your health care provider in the morning, visit the lab for your lab work and know that as early as that day, your provider could be receiving your results securely and privately through their computer. With this information in hand, you could be contacted and if required your treatment could be started or changed, without further delay.

And along the same lines, did you dream of a day when other health care providers could access your past lab results no matter where you received treatment, whether in a walk-in clinic, the emergency room, or for a specialized surgery or treatment in another Saskatchewan community?

The good news is that access to 85 per cent of all lab results collected in the province is available in most places where you receive care.

Recent developments in the electronic health information system in Saskatchewan are making lab results available sooner to authorized health care professionals.

Results are available in these ways:

• When your physician orders a lab test, the physician's electronic medical record (EMR) receives the results directly.  Results are stored securely in the Saskatchewan Laboratory Results Repository (SLRR) database, and may be carbon-copied to others such as specialists.
• The eHealth Portal is a secure online tool developed by eHealth Saskatchewan, with the support of Canada Health Infoway, that will allow authorized health care providers to see lab results for patients, even for tests they have not ordered.
• If a provider, who is not your family physician, orders a test for you and if the tool is instructed to carbon-copy your physician when the results of testing are available, a copy of the results will be sent directly to your physician's electronic medical record (EMR) at the same time.

• If the Sunrise Clinical Manager tool is available in your health region, authorized providers will use it to view lab results ordered locally.

The Saskatchewan Medical Association is working jointly with the Ministry of Health to encourage physicians to adopt electronic medical records (EMRs).  Currently 596 physicians in 187 clinics across the province are enrolled in the joint EMR program. That's over 47 per cent of physicians in the province. Of these, many Saskatchewan physicians are already receiving lab results through their EMRs. Lab results will be widely available to other authorized health care professionals through the Saskatchewan eHealth Portal.

With the ability to look up past results easily, the need to order duplicate tests for patients will be significantly reduced, enabling labs to respond more quickly to other requests.

Any eligible authorized care provider with access to a qualified EMR system, or access to the eHealth Portal, can securely view laboratory results. Although not every region is currently providing results to the SLRR database, we're working on it.

Over 85 per cent of all test results captured by regional laboratory information systems (LIS) and the Saskatchewan Disease Control Laboratory are already available in SLRR. The tool already contains results from:  the Saskatchewan Disease Control Laboratory and the Regina Qu'Appelle, Sunrise, Five Hills, Kelsey Trail and Saskatoon Health Regions. Other regional health authorities will be phased in shortly. Sun Country Health Region will be available in 2012. As the remaining regional health authorities replace their lab information system software (LIS), their results will be available via SLRR.

Safeguards are in place to ensure only health professionals involved in direct care can access a patient's personal health information.

Policies, procedures and computer systems are in place to protect information from unauthorized use, error or loss and to record who has viewed the data. For example, every health care provider who views your file leaves an easily identifiable electronic foot print that details what file was viewed, the date of the viewing and by whom.

While there are many benefits to the Saskatchewan Laboratory Results Repository, a masking option has been developed for residents who wish to request that their lab results be hidden from view.

If you would like to find out more about the masking option, please call the eHealth Saskatchewan Privacy Service at 1-800-667-1672, or visit www.health.gov.sk.ca/masking for more information.

The Lab Results Program or SLRR joins other components of the provincial electronic health record and regional point-of-service electronic systems already in place.

The Radiology Information System and Picture Archiving System (RIS-PACS) allows authorized clinicians to access digital images such as CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds and mammography, regardless of their physical location. 

The Pharmaceutical Information Program (PIP) is another eHealth tool that contains a record of prescription drugs dispensed from all community pharmacies in the province.  The primary goal of PIP is to improve quality of care by providing the information and tools that authorized care providers need to make optimal drug therapy decisions.