Last week, the North Simcoe Muskoka Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) issued a press release about the increased bandwidth, stating it was the first of the 14 LHINs to complete the upgrades for all of its hospitals and large health-care partners.

Thomson told this newspaper that the increase is one component of the network refresh project that was actually completed last fall.

The improvements were done through Smart Systems for Health, a provincial agency whose mandate involves facilitating health-care providers in Ontario with IT solutions, he added.

Thomson said the bandwidth increase means better connectivity between the three MAHC sites at South Muskoka Memorial Hospital in Bracebridge, Huntsville District Memorial Hospital and the Burk’s Falls and District Health Centre.

He added the bandwidth will significantly improve the use of the picture archive and communication system when it is implemented at all three sites in about a year.

“When you’re moving those types of files, it’s a picture and a lot of information, big files. We need a fast network so this has really boosted our network speed to help support that,” he said.

Thomson said the big issue with electronically connecting health-care providers is that it cannot be done on the public Internet due to privacy reasons, so a private network is necessary.

He said a fast, effective network is especially important in a rural area such as Muskoka, where patients often have to travel out of the region to see specialists.

“Clearly we don’t do heart transplants in Huntsville, so if you’re a patient in Huntsville and we have your records, the vision is that if you get transferred to a cardiac care centre or to a hospital in Toronto, we’ll be able to transmit those records to those hospitals electronically,” he said. “(But) a lot of other things have to come together before that’s possible. . . . Right now in the health-care system there’s a lot of paper that flows back and forth, (so this is) a building block to the future.”