Portal simplifies medical registration
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* Lauren Vogel

The Medical Council of Canada (MCC) is rolling out a national Web portal to simplify medical assessment, credentialing and registration.

Using physiciansapply.ca, medical graduates and practising physicians can register for MCC examinations, digitally share exam results and other credentials stored in the council’s central repository, and request verification and translation of international credentials.

Once the system is fully deployed, users will also be able to apply for a medical licence to any of Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial medical regulatory authorities through a single electronic process.

“Currently and in the past, candidates have had to apply to each province and territory individually,” says MCC Executive Director Dr. Ian Bowmer. “If you wanted to apply to more than one province, you’d have to navigate the same process a number of times.”

That system created unnecessary barriers for foreign doctors, “and even our own Canadian graduates, who often want to practise in more than one province early in their careers,” Bowmer says.

With the new portal, “our goal was to have a one-stop application process for international medical graduates, because they needed more support than Canadian applicants,” he says. “But what we’ve got is a system that’s simpler for everyone.”

In phase one of the rollout, the portal was opened to new candidates in Alberta and Nova Scotia, including Canadian medical residents, practising physicians relocating from other provinces and international medical graduates. Other medical regulatory authorities across Canada will adopt the new system over the next two years, says Bowmer.

![Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/186/12/900/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/186/12/900/F1)

A new Web portal will let medical graduates apply for registration in multiple Canadian jurisdictions using a standardized form.

Image courtesy of BakiBG/iStock/Thinkstock

Users will pay a one-time fee — $260 in 2014 — for lifetime access to the portal. The system will also save user data to automatically populate new applications with previously entered details.

Transitioning to the new portal has been “fairly seamless,” says Dr. Kate Reed, assistant registrar for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. It helped that the province already had a fully electronic application process for medical registration, she notes.

According to Dr. William Lowe, deputy registrar for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia, smaller jurisdictions with paper-based processes may be in for a bumpier ride. However, they may also have the most to gain from the new streamlined system.

“If it’s easy to apply to five or six jurisdictions at once, you may be more likely to apply to Nova Scotia,” he says. “I believe we’re likely to see more applications than we would have previously.”

Although the portal will standardize the process of applying for medical registration, jurisdictions will still assess applications according to their own criteria.