What Family Caregivers Should Know About Digital Patient Engagement and Why It Matters
July 21, 2014
Hosted by Dr. Gordon Atherley
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Wendy Graham, MD CCFP FCFP, is CEO of Mihealth Global Systems Inc., https://mihealth.com/, which specializes in secure provider-patient communication, health system integration, and Personal Health Records. She explains digital patient engagement, her work as CEO, and the services provided. She describes the ways in which the services work for patients and their family physicians, and how the services protect the privacy, confidentiality and security of patients and their personal health information. She discusses the particular challenges in protecting the personal health information of family members being cared for by family caregivers, and how the services overcome these. She describes the ways the services work for and with family caregivers with family members with serious physical and mental illnesses who are being cared for at home. She says what more she would like to do to expand the services, and shares her message for family caregivers.
Family Caregivers Unite!
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Family caregivers are the people who provide care to partners, parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors and even co-workers. They are the people who provide care when everyone else has gone home. They are the people who organize the functioning of the home for the person with special needs, and for the family as a whole. They are the coordinators of care, the managers of appointments, the preventers of loneliness, and the makers of decisions even to the point of Power of Attorney. And they are so often people who themselves are burdened with their own health challenges and who may be in only marginally better health than the persons to whom they are providing family caregiving.
Dr. Gordon Atherley
Dr Gordon Atherley holds the British equivalent of the Canadian PhD and MD degrees, and LLD, Honoris Causa, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University. His awards include Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK. His medical specialties are occupational medicine and public health.
As first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the Canadian equivalent of the US National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, he led the creation of Canada’s electronic information service in occupational health and safety, now used in more than 40 countries.
In academia, he held senior, tenured, full-time positions, including departmental chair, in university faculties of physics, engineering, and medicine. He is the author of a textbook and numerous articles and publications.
Since retiring from medical practice, he’s built up Greyhead Associates, which critically researches the safety, effectiveness and fairness of health services for persons with special needs.
Through Virtual Care International, a company of which he’s President, he’s involved in providing sensible technology to family caregivers to help them with their responsibilities, workloads, and concerns.
Now an activist, he urges family caregivers to unite because, more and more, it’s not just their families who depend on them, it’s also the healthcare system as a whole, as it struggles to meet more and more needs of more and more people.
