Two updates this cycle point in the same direction: Ontario is trying to get patients to the right care faster, with less paperwork standing in the way. eReferral Ontario just passed two million referrals processed, and the province has confirmed its next call for proposals to expand primary care access province-wide. Neither is a single headline event, but together they show where provincial health policy is heading over the next few years, and where the practical opportunities are for physicians paying attention now.
eReferral Passes 2 Million Referrals
Ontario Health reports that eReferral Ontario has now processed more than two million referrals, with roughly 2,000 receiving providers and 11,000 referring providers onboarded since the program began rolling out in 2017. The growth is part of Patients Before Paperwork (Pb4P), a joint Ministry of Health and Ontario Health initiative aimed at cutting the administrative load on frontline providers through Central Intake and standardized digital referrals. Ontario Health recently named clinical leads, including Dr. David Urbach and Dr. Stephen Pomedli, specifically to bring frontline physician experience into how the referral process gets redesigned.
Source: Ontario Health, “Announcing Four New Clinical Leads to Support Patients Before Paperwork.” ontariohealth.ca
For a referring physician, eReferral means faxed referral forms and phone-tag with specialists’ offices gradually give way to standardized digital forms with real-time status tracking. Two million referrals is still a fraction of Ontario’s total referral volume, so adoption remains uneven across specialties and regions, but the direction of travel is clear.
A New Round of Primary Care Funding Is Coming in September
Separately, the province has confirmed its next call for proposals, opening September 2026, to create or expand roughly 78 primary care teams. The $250 million investment is part of the broader $3.4 billion Primary Care Action Plan we covered when it was first announced, and it targets connecting 600,000 more Ontarians to a family doctor or primary care team by 2029. Ontario Health Teams will receive guidance ahead of the formal proposal launch.
Source: CP24, “Ontario seeks to add more primary care teams to attach 600,000 people,” August 18, 2026. cp24.com
Locally, this lands on top of ground already being covered in Windsor-Essex, where ONRx’s virtual care partnership is separately targeting 40,000 unattached patients in the region. A new round of provincial team funding raises the real possibility that a Windsor-Essex-area application could be among the successful proposals when this round is decided.
What This Means for Your Practice
If your practice already uses eReferral for some specialties, this is a reasonable moment to check whether more of your regular referral partners have since come online, since the receiving-provider list keeps growing. If you have not adopted it yet, the administrative case gets stronger every time another few hundred providers join, because the value of a standardized digital referral network compounds with adoption.
On the funding side, if you are affiliated with, or aware of, a Windsor-Essex community health centre, family health team, or nurse practitioner-led clinic that might apply for a new or expanded primary care team, September is when that conversation needs to start, well ahead of the formal call for proposals. Ontario Health Teams are being briefed first, so practices with OHT connections have a head start on knowing what is coming.
How MAP Can Help
Whether it is evaluating eReferral adoption for your practice’s workflow or thinking through what a primary care team application actually involves, MAP Healthcare Consulting and Management’s Strategy and Digital Integration service lines help Windsor-Essex practices turn provincial program changes like these into a concrete plan. Visit maphcm.com to learn more.