North York Medical Group
Part of North York Family Health Team
Dear Patients of Drs. Gelman, Manis, Merbaum, Small and Sonshine
Attention: No Access to Medical Records From May 11 to May 14
Your electronic medical record is currently located on a server computer at North York General Hospital. The Government of Ontario now requires that all medical records be located in the cloud - i.e. on a remote server accessed over the internet. Moving to the cloud will make your record more secure and allow us to upgrade some of the features of our medical record software.
Our medical record system is shared by many medical offices. It includes over 100,000 patient files and has been in use for many years. As a result, the process of moving to the cloud is very complex. Our dedicated information technology professionals are working hard to make sure this process happens smoothly. It is going to take 4 days to make the transition. During the transition we will unfortunately not have access to our electronic medical record system. This process is going to take place from Thursday May 11 to Sunday May 14.
During this 4-day period, because we will not have access to your chart, the care we can provide will be limited. Not only will we not have access to our patients’ records, we also will not be able to:
● Receive lab results
● Receive reports from diagnostic imaging labs
● Receive hospital reports
● Receive or send faxes
● Check for medication interactions
● Send or receive Medeo messages
● Renew prescriptions by fax
We will be seeing patients for URGENT ISSUES ONLY during our usual clinic hours on May 11 and Friday May 12. Online booking will not be available so you must call our office if an urgent appointment is needed. However, we can only treat very limited and truly urgent conditions (eg. fever, acute injury), and we will have very limited ability to prescribe medications or order tests. Our after-hours clinic that usually runs on Monday to Thursday evenings and weekend mornings will not be running during this outage. This disruption includes many offices within the North York Family Health Team, including the main Family Health Team office and all of the allied health providers.
In order to minimize the impact, we ask our patients to do the following:
● Check if any prescription medications are going to run out around the time of May 11 to 14. Make sure to request prescription renewals by Monday May 8 to ensure we can respond before the system shuts down. Any requests that are received on or after May 11 will not be responded to until May 15 at the earliest. There will not be a fee for prescriptions renewals by phone/fax in the week around this transition.
● Please do not phone our office on May 11 or May 12, unless it is to receive an urgent same-day appointment. Our receptionists will not have access to your chart and will not be able to address any other questions or requests.
● Avoid having any non-urgent lab or imaging tests completed from May 10 to 14.
● Patients needing urgent medical care from May 11 to May 14 outside of our usual office hours can access the North York Family Physicians’ After Hours Clinic located in the Loblaws at Bayview Village at 2901 Bayview Avenue. This clinic functions on a walk-in basis. The clinic is increasing staffing during this transition to help provide care to our patients. Patients with medical emergencies should access the nearest hospital emergency department as would usually be the case.
● Patients can also call 811 for telephone medical advice.
We apologize for any inconvenience this disruption in service may cause.