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Dr. Ewan Affleck, seen here in his Yellowknife office, has been a general practitioner in Yellowknife for the past 11 years. He says innovations in communication technologies provide many opportunities to improve the quality of health care in the North. - Laura Busch/NNSL photo

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A Yellowknife physician is gaining a national profile after becoming a poster boy for improving the Canadian health care system.

Dr. Ewan Affleck is featured in Canadian Medical Association TV advertisements being broadcast throughout the country in a national campaign promoting physicians who push for innovation in their field. In the ads, Affleck talks about living in Yellowknife and the need to create digital medical records and better communications technology so patients don't have to be flown to Yellowknife from remote communities for otherwise routine medical issues.

One-quarter of the 42,000 people in the NWT had to be transported out of their communities for medical care in 2011, according to the medical association. Flights for medical travel, including medevacs, amounted to $18.9 million in the 2011-12 fiscal year, according to the Stanton Territorial Health Authority.

For about the past eight years, Affleck has been working from one side of his desk on a pet project he believes strongly will greatly improve the quality of health care available to NWT residents - creating electronic patient records that physicians can easily share over long distances.

For Affleck, a doctor in the NWT for the past 11 years, the project is all about results. Digitized records enable medical practitioners in small communities to provide more care at home, resulting in fewer unnecessary medevac flights.

"If we're doing things that do not necessarily result in quality outcomes, then we need to identify those things in order to make the service we provide more efficient," said Affleck.

To date, the project has created digital charts for 55 per cent of NWT patients. These charts are stored in two main databases - one in Yellowknife and the other in Hay River.

"If you're in a small place and you're a nurse and you have a question about a patient, you can send it to a consultant rapidly and they can review the data that they need to make and effective decision," he said. "If you have information all chomped up into little bits and paper charts are split up into individual systems and the person supporting can't see it, then it becomes very difficult to be able to offer support."

In recent years, a digital X-ray archiving system has been established which enables X-ray technicians and doctors in Yellowknife to review scans taken at community health clinics.

"Before, they were often just getting medevaced out," said Affleck of X-ray patients.

Even though Yellowknife is the hub of medical care in the territory, there are certain services that are too expensive to provide here. For example, any patient requiring radiation therapy or heart surgery must travel to Edmonton, he said. While Affleck would love to see Stanton Territorial Hospital equipped with its own MRI machine, some essential services are simply too expensive and too little used to bring North.

"We can't expect to have radiotherapy available in every community in Canada. It's not sustainable; the entire system would go bankrupt," he said. "So, we have to reconcile, and that's the same the world over."

This recognition that major changes are needed is exactly what the Canadian Medical Association's campaign is all about, said the association's president Dr. Anna Reid, also a Yellowknife physician.

"Pretty well everyone agrees - patients, public, health-care providers - that the health-care system is not meeting the needs of Canadians," she told News/North.

While Affleck admits he is biased, he said tax dollars would be best spent digitizing records and test scans while ensuring that as many communities as possible have access to a fibre-optic Internet link.

For him, the smart money will innovate how medical practitioners can communicate with one another over vast distances.

"We need to ensure that we can provide health-care service here in an effective way," he said.

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