To make outgoing referrals (called Consultations) from OSCAR or to link a demographic to a referring physician and their billing number, the physician you are referring to/referencing needs to be in the specialists list so they can be selected.
For OSCAR systems only in BC, all the BC physicians will be already in this list (pre-loaded from MSP/Teleplan connection). For all other provinces, OSCAR does not have a pre-loaded list of doctors so you have to manually add them/import your list.
You can’t put all of the physicians in Canada into your OSCAR system (10s of thousands of doctors) because the oscarConsultationRequest webpage actually loads all the specialist info into that one webpage, and it would be impossible to maintain (doctors are constantly changing their info). Even the physicians list in one large province (Ontario) is huge/excessive. It’s too much and won’t work. A few hundred specialists is manageable but not 100,000. It is usually better to build the OSCAR specialists list one at a time based on local referral patterns and to ensure correct information is entered.
For a list of all doctors in Canada with their contact info, there are databases that you can purchase, like this one and this one I believe. Not sure if they will include the physicians’ billing number etc.
Alternatively, for free, you can go through each provincial colleges’ websites and lookup the doctors which will give you their names, phone numbers, sometimes fax #, and address. There is a statutory obligation for physicians to update this info with their college. The billing number/referring physician # is not available on the public provincial colleges websites. For example: http://doctors.cpso.on.ca/, https://rclogin.royalcollege.ca/webcenter/portal/rcdirectory_en, etc.
Usually you can find the following info of doctors in these registries:
- CPSO#
- Last Name
- First Name
- Middle Name
- Concerns or additional info
- Clinic name
- Address1
- Address2
- City
- Phone
- Fax
- Other practise locations
- Areas of Specialization
- Former name
It’s publicly available information so there is no issue in sharing it.
Here is a spreadsheet of physicians in the Scarborough Area which includes the above info.