Here comes the auditor

Wednesday, October 7 will be a day of reckoning for eHealth Ontario as the Provincial Auditor will issue a report, about which the leaks have already told us quite a bit. It won't be pretty.

As a former employee, I am following the news quite closely. It has been a rough four months for the agency with senior departures, microscopic scrutiny and now what should be the nadir in reputation for the organization.

Is there anything that can be done for the embattled agency's reputation and communications? I imagine people are hoping this will blow away as soon as possible. It will blow away eventually, but the question is what can be done about its communications at this point?

Likely not too much in the immediate term. The provincial government is too involved to leave the agency to communicate on its own at this point as the problems have affected them in many unhappy ways.

The bottom line is that trust has been broken and needs to be re-established. This is going to take a long time. But the place to start now is to build alliances with other eHealth organizations and leaders. This will have to be an under the radar effort for some time, but it is the place to build the new reputational foundation for the future.

Of course, if management decisions keep being made that will embarrass the organization in future, then there is not much that any communications program can achieve. Let's hope that fundamental change is the first order of business.