Ontario Introduces New Measures To Ease Admin Burden On Doctors, Does Away With Sick Note Requirement

The province is taking steps to ease the administrative burden on doctors, including doing away with the sick note requirement for short absences.

The Ford government will soon introduce legislation that if passed will no longer allow employers to require a sick note from a doctor for the provincially protected three days of sick leave workers are entitled to.

A spokeswoman for the labour minister says employers will retain the right to require another form of evidence from an employee such as an attestation or a receipt for over-the-counter medication.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones also said Ontario is expanding a program that uses artificial intelligence to summarize or transcribe conversations with patients to more than 150 primary care providers.

“Our government is making common sense changes that will reduce the administrative burden on family doctors so that they can spend more time caring for patients instead of doing duplicative or unnecessary paperwork,” Jones said.

The patient must give their consent to doctors to use the program.

The province also plans to digitize more referral and consultation forms and is working to improve the eForms platform. Other initiatives include:

•“Axe the fax” to replace fax machines over the next few years to speed up diagnosis, referrals and treatments while improving the privacy of patient’s health information.

•Expanding eServices to digitize more referral and consultation forms so they can be conveniently shared electronically in a timely manner to obtain specialist advice, often eliminating the need for an in-person specialist visit entirely.

•Working with the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) to streamline and simplify 12 key government medical forms that are burdensome, as well as digitizing and integrating more forms into electronic medical records.

•Accelerating the expansion of the centralized waitlist program for surgical and diagnostic services that will take the guesswork out of the referral process and provide faster access to care for patients.

OMA President Andrew Park says doctors spend nearly as much time on computers as they do with patients.

Park says physicians spend, on average, 19 hours per week on administrative duties, which often leads to less time with patients and poor work-life balance.