Ocean helps make care more convenient

Our clinic uses Ocean and if you want to learn more about how the technology works while keeping your health information safe and secure, this guide is for you

Ocean helps you make your care more convenient.

  • Book your own appointments

  • Receive secure emails and SMS (texts)

  • Complete forms for your appointments digitally

Book Your APPOINTMENT!

OceanMD (formerly CognisantMD) is a software company based in Toronto, Ontario. Our Ocean software is used across Canada by over 25,000 healthcare providers to connect with over 10,000 patients daily. The Ocean Platform is used by numerous Public Health organizations, the Ontario Ministry of Health, and leading teaching hospitals.

Ocean is designed to help make healthcare better and easier for patients. With Ocean, you can be sure your patient information is always kept private and secure, using the most advanced technology available. For example, when you interact with Ocean to complete a form on a tablet in the waiting room or through a secure email, your responses are encrypted from end-to-end, then transmitted directly into your patient record at the health care provider’s office. This eliminates the need for your clinic to print and mail out forms and transcribe your responses while giving you an easier way to contribute to your own record.

How to use Ocean

    1. Go to our online booking portal.

    2. Choose your Family Doctor.

    3. Enter your first and last name, date of birth, and health number.

    4. Pick the provider you want to see.

    5. Pick your appointment type, answer additional questions, and complete forms (if applicable).

    6. Pick a date and time for the appointment.

    7. Check your email to make sure it’s spelled correctly and book your appointment!

    1. Open and read the email from your healthcare provider.

    2. If they include any personal health information or need you to complete forms, there will be a blue weblink in the body of the message. Clicking on the link will take you to an encrypted page where you can see your secure message and forms.

    3. To access your secure message, enter your date of birth. Depending on the provider, there may be additional security questions to validate your identity.

    4. Read over the secure message. If there are any attachments, download the files via the “Download” button before proceeding.

    5. Click “Next” to move on to your forms. If there are no forms, you can close the window.

    Once your forms are complete, your responses will be automatically sent into your patient record for the provider to review.

  • Coming Soon!

    1. While the Ocean Platform allows patients to respond to a secure message and/or send photos and documents, these features are optional and fully controlled by your healthcare provider. If your healthcare provider is using Ocean for secure file transfer, please follow these steps:

      1. Go to your healthcare provider’s file uploader.

    2. Enter your first and last name, date of birth, and health number.

    3. Click the checkbox labelled “I would like to include an attachment with this message.”

    4. Click the “Add Attachments” button to select one or more files. Hit “Finish” once you’re done.

FAQs

Privacy and Security

  • No. As noted above, OceanMD is committed to keeping patient data secure using the most stringent approaches to data security and privacy. Furthermore, since all data is fully encrypted, OceanMD cannot access personal health information in a readable format. In this encrypted state, data is meaningless and can not be commoditized or sold to a third party, including the parent company of OceanMD, WELL Health Inc.

  • The Ocean Platform was built from the ground up to ensure patient health data is kept private and secure, using client-side patient encryption technology. All patient data sent to and stored within Ocean is encrypted end-to-end using the industry-standard 256-bit AES, the same technology used for online banking. 

    To further guard against any possible breach of personal health information on our Ocean servers, patient data is encrypted using a private key, created by and known only by health clinic administrators. Since encryption keys are kept private and stored locally within each individual clinic, no agent outside of the clinic can ever decrypt or read private patient information. This ensures that even the most trusted staff and technical team members at OceanMD are completely unable to read patient charts or any private health information. 

  • OceanMD is not an electronic medical record (EMR) system and not designed to act as a long-term repository of health information. All patient data is stored in encrypted form only for a limited time in order to support patient care. During that time period, only healthcare providers with a secure login and access to the clinic’s unique encryption key can access decrypted patient health information residing in Ocean. Once patient data has been successfully downloaded to the patient chart in the clinic’s EMR, it is routinely deleted from the Ocean Platform. All Ocean data, including client-side encrypted PHI, is stored in our primary storage facility located in Montreal, with additional copies of the data kept in a warm failover disaster recovery facility in Toronto. 

  • Traditional email communication comes with a lot of privacy risks – emails and their contents can easily be forwarded without your knowledge, messages may be sent to the wrong address, and more.

    To combat some of these risks, you are asked to provide a date of birth. This is then compared to the date of birth in your patient record. If there is a match and you are the intended recipient for the message, you’ll be able to proceed.

    Ocean does not collect or save your PHI for validation checks.