Howard Ovens has been in Emergency Medicine practice since 1982. He is the former Chief of the Dept. of Emergency Medicine for Sinai Health System in Toronto and is now the Chief Medical Strategy Officer and Medical Advisor to the Foundation. Dr. Ovens is a Full Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, and a member of the Public Affairs Committee of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. He’s the former Lead for EM for the Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) and has been the Ontario Expert Lead for EM since 2009. In that role he’s championed two very unique provincial initiatives; “eCTAS” and “The Return Visit Audit Program”. Since 2022 he has been leading the creation of a new program – “PES” or Provincial Emergency Services at Ontario Health Central.
Among the high impact work in Dr. Ovens’ career is public policy related to ED access and overcrowding and the Ontario pay for results program, design and implementation of “eCTAS” an intelligent triage decision support tool, the Ontario Return Visit Audit – a unique jurisdictional approach to quality improvement in the ED, and mandatory reporting of gunshot wounds in Canadian ED’s.