
Ontario Telemedicine Network

The Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN) is one of the largest telemedicine networks in the world. It uses two-way videoconferencing to provide access to care for patients in every hospital and hundreds of other health care locations across the province. In addition to clinical care, OTN facilitates the delivery of distance education and meetings for health care professionals and patients.
Members and Network Partners.
The Network has nearly 600 members, including all public hospitals, Family Health Teams, clinics, physician offices, nursing stations, medical and nursing schools, professional organizations, Community Care Access Centres, LHIN offices, First Nations Communities, long-term care homes, educational facilities and public health.
Utilization.
The Network consists of more than 1200 sites and 2200 endpoints and more than 3200 health care referrers and consultants use the Network to provide care to patients.
OTN supports access to care across a wide variety of clinical therapeutic areas of care. The top five clinical categories supporting patient care are mental health and addictions; internal medicine; oncology; surgery and rehabilitation services.
In addition to facilitating the delivery of patient care, OTN enables teaching and learning at a distance via videoconferencing and webcasting. More than 390,000 health care professionals participate in OTN-facilitated education each year. In fiscal 2010–11, OTN hosted 11,595 educational events, and 13,146 administrative events. In fiscal 2010–11, OTN hosted more than 1,500 webcasts, a 67% increase over the previous year. There was also a 19% increase in viewership of archived webcasts over 2009–2010, for a total of 28,264 views.
Use of Telemedicine in the Province resulted in an avoidance of 121 million kilometres of patient travel and an elimination of nearly 65 million kilograms of pollutants.