Hospitals sharing services in order to trim their costs.

• Position: Industry Overview

The expected restructuring of the health-care system might not be as wrenching for some Northern Ontario hospitals as one might assume.

In larger centres such as Sudbury and North Bay hospitals are rationalizing services and facilities without rationing care.

The North Bay Civic Hospital and St. Joseph's General Hospital of North Bay have been sharing laboratory services, diagnostic systems and facilities for nuclear medicine.

Louise Johnson, the executive director of St. Joseph's, says the rationalization process is an on-going one, and that the province's current financial crisis merely sped up the process.

Meanwhile, Sudbury General Hospital and Sudbury Memorial Hospital are in the initial segment of a five-year program to share a common data bank of patient information and other information.

The first portion of the program, implemented at the end of 1990, included information from the two hospitals' admissions and human resources departments. The second segment, which went on line last May, involved laboratory data. The third segment merged data from the hospitals' pharmacies last fall.

Data utilized by the...