Virtual care now available to all Nova Scotians without a family doctor after successful pilot

Virtual care is now available to every Nova Scotian on the wait-list for a family doctor or nurse practitioner after a successful pilot program.

The program, called VirtualCareNS, started in the spring and was first made available to people in the northern and western health zones who had signed up to the health authority's wait-list for a primary care provider.

"Due to its success … we are now broadly offering this service to all Nova Scotians," Dr. Gail Tomblin Murphy, the vice-president of research, innovation and discovery for Nova Scotia Health, told CBC Radio's Information Morning Halifax on Wednesday.

"So we've scaled up in the northern and western zones and now into the central zone, as well as the eastern zone."

In November, more than 81,000 Nova Scotians were on the province's doctor wait-list, up by more than 60 per cent from the same time last year.

This program is designed to help those without a family doctor access medical appointments for things like prescription refills, minor illnesses and injuries, and aches and pains, without going to the emergency department.

Tomblin Murphy said the program will also help people with sexual health needs and mental health services.

In September, when Premier Tim Houston announced the expansion, he said the widespread lack of access to primary care has had a negative ripple effect on the whole health-care system.

Tomblin Murphy said she's already seeing an improvement for virtual care patients and the health-care system.

"There's many, many factors that actually get at our emergency rooms and access and flow issues, but we are seeing some promising findings from the impact of this innovative solution in Nova Scotia," she said.

How it works

Tomblin Murphy said registration emails have started being sent to people on the Need a Family Practice Registry this week. People living in the central and eastern zones, who have been on the registry the longest, will be the first to receive the registration emails.

She said registration will require a Nova Scotia health card number and some personal information that is normally asked during doctor visits.

Once a patient is registered, they will be able to request an appointment online, which will connect them to an intake person who will help assess their need.

If virtual care appointment is deemed necessary, the patient will be put in a queue, which generally only takes about 29 minutes.

"The beauty is because we had virtual care as a result of COVID — that's kind of the silver lining of COVID — it's just like if you were going to your own family doctor," Dr. Maria Alexiadis, the senior medical director of the Primary Health Care and Chronic Disease Management Network for Nova Scotia Health, told Information Morning. 

Alexiadis, who is also a family physician, said she's already providing virtual care to her regular patients which has worked well during the pandemic.

She expects similar results with people on the doctor wait-list, and hopes it will provide them with better, and continued, access.

She said background information about medical history will be saved for future online visits.

"When you're doing a virtual visit and it's at the video call, you can actually see things [like] if it's a skin rash, and then make your clinical judgment and make the prescriptions or the next steps,"  Alexiadis said.

"So in this particular platform, you not only can make a diagnosis and send prescriptions off to the place that the patient prefers to go to, but also you can make referrals to specialists, lab tests and diagnostics."