Making health care information easier to access
Imagine: You’ve just moved to Ontario. You’re not familiar with how the health care system works here, but you know you’ll need to see a doctor in the near future. Chances are, you’re asking yourself a lot of questions.
What exactly is OHIP?
Where do I get a health card?
How do I find a new family doctor?
Without the right resources, finding answers can prove to be time-consuming, and even frustrating.
That’s where we think we can help.
The Ontario Digital Service teamed up with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) to create Ontario.ca/Health: a new resource designed to connect you with the health care you need as quickly and simply as possible.
Through user research—including targeted user focus groups and over 1,400 respondents to our health care information survey so far—we heard that Ontarians rarely have trouble finding online content about their symptoms (who hasn’t tried to self-diagnose themselves on the web?), but what tends to be missing is the Ontario-specific content that explains how to get the help you need to treat these symptoms in your community. This is especially true in specialized areas, like mental health and fertility, which may fall outside of a family doctor’s field of expertise.
Our goal was to close these gaps in information by applying the principles of good service design to connect people to the care they need. By talking to real Ontarians, and getting a better understanding of their needs, we created online content and tools designed for them.
One of the ways we’re working to open up health information is to present it to people in a way that makes sense to them. It’s not enough to just display or list all of the departments and divisions that make up our healthcare system and expect people to figure it out alone. Instead, we wanted to strip away the jargon and present information in a straightforward way. We did this by addressing the issues we know people need help with first, including:
- learning the ins and outs of OHIP coverage
- getting help to pay for prescription drugs
- how to find a family doctor
- making sure all this information is available on any device, in any format
The new health page builds on some earlier work we’ve done together to simplify the online experience for users of our health care system. Tools like Health Care Options, a vaccination scheduler, and the naloxone kit finder were all designed to help people find health services near them.
In the next few weeks, the ODS and Ministry of Health and Long-term Care teams will be sharing more about the work we’re doing, including:
- Conducting user research in a lightweight way
- New approaches for project governance
- How we’re thinking about wait times
- How to make digital immunization records better available to parents
In keeping with our user-centric approach, we’d love to learn more about how you use (or would like to use) technology in regard to your own health care.
You can share feedback through a short survey that’s open until September 1st, 2017. It takes only a few minutes to complete. This information will help us improve and iterate our page and future products designed to help users access and navigate the health care system.
