Ontario Ministry of Health Rejecting OSCAR is a $1 Billion Mistake.

"The province has rejected McMaster University's offer to get every family doctor using electronic health records within two years.
McMaster said it would need less than $20 million to get the 8,000 family doctors still using paper files in Ontario switched to an electronic health records system created by the university and called OSCAR.
But the Ministry of Health says it's sticking to its policy of letting individual doctors decide whether they want electronic health records and what system to use.

...He believes patients are going to have to get much more demanding before the government will make real progress on electronic health records.

He hopes public outrage over the ongoing eHealth scandal, which saw the province spend 10 years and $1 billion in a largely failed effort to create digital health records, will be enough to force change...."

OSCAR was developed by McMaster associate professor Dr. David Chan and was first used in Hamilton in 2001.
Along with providing an electronic record the doctor can access anywhere, it has many tools to help doctors, such as checklists to diagnose illness, alerts when drugs are improperly prescribed and reminders when screening is due.
The system gives patients access to their own health records to check whether test results have come in, track their cholesterol over time or provide other doctors access if they need care when they're out of town.
"Patients more and more now want to access their own records," said Dr. David Price, chair of McMaster's department of family medicine.
He thinks OSCAR has the potential to bring Ontario up to speed.
"We are one of the laggards in the developed world in developing electronic medical records for our patients," he said.