Greater Hamilton Health Network: An OHT That Put Online Booking in Its Priorities

Most Ontario Health Teams talk about digital health in generalities. The Greater Hamilton Health Network (GHHN) — one of the province's first OHTs, spanning Hamilton, Haldimand, and Niagara Northwest with more than 30 member organizations — wrote it down. Its published digital health priorities include: enable online appointment booking for GHHN members across primary and acute care; establish a single identity-managed digital front door for patients to reach booking, health data, and community services; bring EMRs to paper-based member organizations; and connect providers with secure messaging.

Attachment money, twice over

On the access side, the GHHN's numbers keep compounding. A $2.2-million provincial investment in primary care team expansion helped the Hamilton Family Health Team and GHHN partners attach more than 6,000 people to team-based primary care. In 2026, a further investment of nearly $5 million was announced to connect 10,398 more residents of Hamilton, Haldimand, and Niagara Northwest — with the Hamilton FHT operating a direct attachment channel residents can reach by phone or email. The GHHN also runs a physician recruitment program, recently expanded into Haldimand through a county partnership.

HealthPathways comes to Canada

Together with the Burlington OHT and Middlesex London OHT, the GHHN launched HealthPathways in Canada — giving local clinicians access to hundreds of localized, evidence-based care pathways covering assessment, management, and referral, at the point of care. It's the clinician-facing half of the same thesis as the digital front door: put the right option one click away and the system behaves better.

The playbook, and the gap it closes

Read the GHHN's priorities as a sequence and the logic is clean: attach thousands of new patients (funding), give clinicians shared pathways (HealthPathways), then make the whole network reachable through one front door with online booking across primary and acute care. That last step is the one Empower was built for — EMR-integrated booking that writes directly to clinic schedules, plus the only production hospital-EHR booking integration in our category, which is exactly what 'primary and acute' requires in practice. When an OHT puts online booking in its published priorities, the remaining question is implementation quality: uptake rules, language coverage, and whether the booking actually lands in the chart. Hamilton has the strategy; the region's clinics get to decide how well it's executed.

Sources & further reading

• GHHN — Priorities (online appointment booking, digital front door, HealthPathways)
• Hamilton FHT — $5M to connect 10,398 more people
• Ontario Primary Care Action Plan — GHHN $2.2M / 6,000+ attached
• GHHN — updates (recruitment program, Haldimand expansion)