Did you know? As part of our goal to build the best platform for patient engagement and provider communication in Canada, Ocean releases new features, product updates and improvements every three weeks. This means in the last 6 months alone, we had 10 development cycles, each time releasing 20 to 30 (and sometimes even more) updates.

To highlight some of the great work done by our product and development teams, below is a not-so-exhaustive roundup of our latest updates. But of course, this isn’t everything our teams have worked on. To read our release notes, or to receive updates directly to your inbox, follow the instructions in this support article.

1. Convenient kiosk check-ins using alternate IDs

If you have a check-in kiosk, or you’re thinking of getting one to streamline your waiting room, this one is for you. Our clinics serve a widely diverse group of patients, many of whom may not have a health number. To accommodate this, Ocean now supports check-in using alternate IDs, including student card numbers, First Nations Status numbers, and more, as long as it’s numerical.

2. Online Booking made simpler for patients, faster for clinics

The use of online booking has skyrocketed in the past few years as more clinics and their patients realize the benefits, including less wait times, more flexibility, and reduced administrative burden. To make Ocean’s online booking even more accessible for both our users and their patients, we’ve made a number of improvements including:

• Patients can now book appointments with other care team members by making use of the “Other Provider” fields in the EMR
• For EMRs that use our FHIR API (eg. Intrahealth), Ocean can automatically create new patient charts when an appointment is booked online

3. Improved workflows for Med Access users

With the recent expansion of eReferrals in Nova Scotia, our team has worked on various updates to improve the Med Access-Ocean integration, including:

• Appointments are now pushed directly from Med Access into Ocean saving hours of admin time
• Attachments can be added directly to an eReferral without needing to download the file locally, improving data security (see Extension FAQ below)
• Better keyword and CPP field mapping when sending an eReferral through Ocean means fewer errors and faster workflows

4. Even more powerful virus protection

If you ever receive files or attachments from patients, then this one is important to your practice. Security and privacy are core to our daily operations at Ocean which is why we’ve developed a robust file-scanning system at the point of upload. If you’ve only ever dealt with clean files, you may not have even noticed it in action. Whether it’s photos and documents from patients, or PDFs in eReferrals, Ocean is scanning thousands of files for malware at any given time.

Ocean is one of the few healthcare platforms that offer virus scanning. By scanning files at the point of upload and before they enter the EMR, this prevents clinics from inadvertently downloading or sharing dangerous files that might impact an entire clinic’s operations.

Thanks again for trusting Ocean with your patient engagement and provider communication needs. We look forward to building more great products and features so stay tuned!