Ontario Medical Informatics Working Group Joins InfoCentral

“Most of the key problems in Canada have already been solved at least ten times, we just need to do a better job at scaling and replicating the good ideas.” Andre Picard, Canada's top health and public policy writer recently shared this sentiment and highlights the principles under which our group has been operating.

The Ontario Medical Informatics Working Group (OMIWG), a forum that brings together Chief Medical Informatics Officers (CMIOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from across Ontario. The group is co-chaired by Dr. Peter Rossos (University Health Network) and Dr. Tom Janzen (London Health Sciences Centre) and has been meeting since the Fall of 2008. The group has just recently transitioned onto InfoCentral as a private forum, which means it is not publicly visible on InfoCentral, but is open to all Ontario-based CMIOs and CIOs. 

The OMIWG meets monthly by teleconference and webex, the first Thursday of each month 8-9:30am, to discuss relevant topics of interest and to share learnings and other updates. The group also meets once a year for a full-day retreat to have a more extended exchange of information and engage with other provincial healthcare technology stakeholders including representatives from the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care, eHealth Ontario, Canada Health Infoway and others. Over the past few years the group has taken on several important strategic topics such as the provincial EHR, advancing the provincial strategy for medication management, secure communication and advanced use of clinical information systems, bringing an important clinical voice to the table. The group also is an effective forum to discuss topics such as: patient oriented discharge summaries, big data and analytics, HIS renewal, cloud computing, ePrescribing, standards, privacy, identity management, EMRs, community integration, etc.

InfoCentral offers a great platform for the OMIWG community, and does so in a way that allows members to easily join other pan-Canadian communities of interest. The hope is that other provinces and territories might set up similar groups and perhaps there will be an opportunity for groups like this to also tackle inter-jurisdictional issues and knowledge sharing. If you are interested in joining OMIWG, please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..