I am a family physician serving patients in the North Shore , and I want to share what it has been like working in a health care system where the pieces often don’t connect.
Every day, I see patients whose care is fragmented simply because the information about them is fragmented.
Here are some examples of what this looks like in practice:
Specialists often don’t have the full picture
I regularly see patients who are being followed by multiple specialists, yet those providers cannot easily see each other’s notes, recent investigations, or medication changes.
A specialist may not know that a patient has already had a recent imaging study, that another specialist has changed their medication, or that they have been seen repeatedly in hospital for the same problem.
As the family physician, I often end up trying to connect the dots — sending letters, faxing reports, tracking down information and asking one provider to communicate with another… And even when I ask, they often don’t.
For patients with complex medical needs, this can mean seven or more providers caring for the same person without everyone being able to see the same information.
The same tests can be repeated because nobody can see what has already been done. CareConnect does help a bit but I find most specialists will not bother with the extra step. The patient needs to have their labs visible for the specialists within a unified clinical record.
I see unnecessary duplication of laboratory and diagnostic testing because providers do not have a simple way to know what has already been ordered or completed elsewhere.
Patients may have the same or similar investigations repeated by different providers, sometimes within a very short period of time.
The patient experiences inconvenience, the health care system pays for the duplication, and physicians spend time trying to determine what has already happened.
In a publicly funded system with limited resources, this is difficult to justify.
Hospital visits can disappear from the bigger picture
A patient may go to hospital several times for the same problem, while their specialist may not be aware of the pattern.
The patient often assumes that if they went to hospital, their specialist will know about it. The specialist may assume that if something important happened, the patient would update them.
Meanwhile, everyone is working from an incomplete picture.
This is not a failure of individual physicians or patients. It is a systems problem.
Even sending a simple laboratory requisition can involve unnecessary manual work and opportunity for error.
It is hard to believe that in 2026, I can electronically order investigations for a patient, only for that information to effectively become a PDF that then has to be manually re-entered into another system.
There are opportunities for information to be missed, entered incorrectly, or separated from the clinical context that I provided.
We have the technology to do much better.
I spend too much of my day connecting the system instead of caring for patients
These individual problems may seem small, but they add up.
Every day, physicians and staff spend time tracking down reports, reconciling medications, checking whether tests have already been done, communicating between specialists, and trying to piece together what has happened to a patient elsewhere in the system.
That is time that could be spent caring for patients.
It also contributes to physician burnout, creates opportunities for errors, and adds unnecessary costs to our health care system.
What is most frustrating is that patients understandably assume their health care providers can see what has happened to them across the system. Often, we cannot.
I have worked in health care systems where information could follow the patient much more seamlessly. I know that a more connected approach is possible.
Patients should not have to be the ones connecting the dots between their own health care providers.
I should not have to rely on a patient remembering which specialist ordered which test, or manually send information from one physician to another and hope it reaches the right place.
I want to see a BC health care system where the right information is available to the right health care provider, at the right time — securely and with appropriate privacy protections.
That would mean less duplication, fewer opportunities for error, less administrative burden, and more time for what matters most: taking care of patients.
This is why I support Connect Every Visit. BC needs to make connected care a priority and build a health information system where the pieces actually connect.