The eHealth Ontario saga widened Monday with revelations that a consultant was paid $30,000 for 78 hours work, and the son of board chairman Alan Hudson worked for a firm closely connected to the agency before leaving for IBM.
With Ontario Health Minister David Caplan conceding that reforms are necessary at the embattled agency, documents show that Penny Ballem was paid for the 78 hours over the objections of an eHealth employee who said no contract was signed for her work.
Dr. Ballem got the consulting assignment through Michael Guerriere, a managing partner at Courtyard Group, which itself has lucrative contracts with eHealth. The eHealth employee was told to process the payment to Dr. Ballem because Dr. Guerriere could validate her invoice, the documents show.
Dr. Ballem, a former deputy health minister in British Columbia, said in an interview Monday that she was to lead Ontario’s plan to improve the management of diabetes. But she had to bow out last December after she was appointed city manager of Vancouver.
She said she is well known in the health-care sector for developing British Columbia’s electronic records as a deputy minister.
“The senior health community is pretty small in this country,” she said.
Dr. Guerriere worked with Dr. Hudson at the University Health Network until 2000 and have maintained close ties since.
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How many mri, catscans, hip replacement etc could this money have funded. This misuse of money is much more serious than what Lisa said, 4 days after taking office.
Perhaps people should protest in front of these women’s homes, aka AIG execs.
Shame them into giving the money back. How can they sleep at night. Have they or Dalton no concern for all those sick people out there, being denied needed car.
It seems to me (and I have been known to be wrong) that everytime a government buys a new computer system taxpayers end up paying billions and end up with nothing.
My view is that the next government clown who suggests we need a new computer system should be promptly marched out of the legislature and shot and pissed on.
Kinda reminds one of the lieberals computerizing their “long gun registry’ which I believe now stands at about $2 billion cost to the Canadian taxpayer.
I personally witnessed an insurance company go bankrupt after they bought into their THIRD COMPUTER SYSTEM! “Sxot happens!” Whose profiting, eh?? Not the taxpayers.
Follow the money as they say.
Fraud and racketeering charges need to be laid against these people and their Liberal friends, it’s the only way we might find out the extent of the rot in our provincial government.