Queen's Gets OSCARized

We are very happy to welcome to the OSCAR community Queen's Family Health Team, Department of Family Medicine, Queen's University.

If you visited one of their four clinics this week,  you may have noticed the staff a little more wide-eyed than normal.

Queen's has been using an EMR for many years, and so the conversion from their old system to OSCAR has been quite an activity. Countless hours of preparation and planning have gone into making the transition as seamless as possible.

At 8:30 on June 7th the first patients were being seen. Soon thereafter, records were being entered, results were being reviewed, forms and requisitions where being filled, and the first prescriptions were being electronically signed and faxed to the local pharmacies. 

A collection of clinics with well over 100 users needs some reasonable hardware to run their practice. Queen's primary server has dual quad core hyper threaded Xeon CPUs coupled with a non trivial amount of memory.

EMR conversions are pretty intensive operations. Tens of thousands of medical records have to be meticulously moved and reviewed to ensure data integrity and patient information is maintained.

Throughout the process is important to maintain good sense of humour and to remember why you decided to move to a new EMR in the first place.

Thank you Queen's for to moving to OSCAR. 

Transforming your Patient Engagement: OSCAR on the iPad

Say goodbye to that "third person" in your examining rooms.

OSCAR is the only Ontario Certified EMR platform that runs on the Apple iPad. This fact is true because OSCAR is a standards based web application that has not been hardwired into a specific operating system or web browser.

OSCAR clinicians today are currently experiencing the joys of engaging their patients using the unobtrusive iPad technology. Early feedback has been extremely encouraging, although there are still some issues to work through (native printing within the iPad is not currently supported, however, there is an app for that).

iPad and iPad-like technology will revolutionize your engagement with your patients and, if you are an OSCAR user, you are already good to go.

OSCAR users - isn't it nice to know that you picked the right solution, one that was mindful of the pervasive transformative technology trends? Congratulations.

(Yes - this is a big deal)