The Ontario Telehealth Telephone Helpline (henceforth referred to as “Telehealth”) was implemented in Ontario in 2001. It is administered by Clinidata, a private contractor hired by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays, at no cost to the caller. The calls are answered by registered nurses in both official languages from four calling centres that use identical decision rules (algorithms) and store all call information into one centralized data repository. The calls are usually approximately 10-minutes, patient based, and are directed by a nurse-operated electronic clinical support system.
Objective
Following the lead established by the UK’s NHS Direct Syndromic Surveillance system as well as the SARS Report’s desire to “broaden the information collection capacity of Telehealth as a syndromic surveillance tool,” we are retrospectively evaluating the value of Ontario’s Telehealth’s health helpline as a syndromic surveillance system. To date, there have been no published descriptions of Telehealth. This article endeavours to address this lacuna.