WINKLER - So much for Mennonite frugality. This vibrant, staunchly religious farming community is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on its quest to set the trend in high-tech health care in Canada. And it appears to be working. Winkler's 13 doctors carry laptops with them everywhere they go. The local clinic here - which handles 30,000 patients spanning an area from the TransCanada Highway to the U.S. border, and from Vita to Boissevain - operates on a paperless system. Patient files and lab reports are called up from computers right in the examining rooms. Only a few clinics across Canada have replaced hard-copy patient files with an electronic version, said clinic administrator Jim Neufeld. Next spring, the 13-physician clinic will relocate to Winkler's drab downtown mall, which is to be refurbished into a health and wellness plaza - featuring a denturist, chiropractor, physiotherapist and health food store - centered around a new 71-unit seniors tower, set to open in 2002. The new $11-million apartment/mall/clinic complex has been four years in the making. In early May, the new $35-million Boundary Trails health Centre, located between Morden and Winkler, will open its doors to patients. The hospital will operate a cutting-edge filmless digital-imaging system that will allow doctors, radiologists and other specialists to simultaneously view the same images from different locations. It's expected to cut costs and drastically curb delays in diagnosis. The clinic will be patched into the network with computers in every examination room and its own digital lab and X-ray systems. With the click of a mouse, doctors and radiologists can view scans simultaneously and discuss treatment over the phone while the patient sits in the examining room. The system was piloted in the United states and is only now making its way into Canadian hospitals. "We said, 'let's keep on the cutting edge instead of deteriorating like everywhere else,'" said mall owner and developer Alvin Thiessen. If everything goes as planned, downtown Winkler will become a one-stop health-care mecca for seniors. "You will never need to leave," said Thiessen. In addition to all the healthcare services, the mall will have a hair salon, grocery store and bank. And the image fits with this town's demographics...

Winkler building a MEDICAL MECCA

by Tracy Tjaden

Winnipeg Free Press, September 2000