TORONTO - Critics are wondering why the Ontario government has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create electronic health records when the province already has a computer-based system that stores health records and links more than 100 hospital sites.

There is a catch though: the electronic Child Health Network shares records only for those aged 19 and under.

Ontario's struggles to create electronic health records are well known: more than $650 million has been spent and the government has been embarrassed into shutting down the first agency charged with the task only to find the second agency mired in an expense scandal.

The eCHN was set up in 1999 to link some Toronto hospitals in an effort to coordinate health-care delivery for mothers, newborns, children and youth, and has since expanded to include the majority of hospitals in Ontario.

"Pretty well all the major ones that deal with pediatrics, all the big ones and many of the medium sized ones," said Andrew Szende, CEO of electronic Child Health Network.

"If you're a doctor looking after a kid, you can go into this repository -- we don't call it a database -- and it will have the integrated or consolidated record of that patient from any of the hospitals where he or she may have been treated."

Ontario's opposition parties want to know why the province has spent so much taxpayers' money to develop electronic health records for adults when there is a working system already in operation.

"It begs the question of why all this money was spent when we had a homegrown product already that could have been expanded," said Progressive Conservative health critic Christine Elliott.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath expressed the same frustration.

"We're shaking our heads in surprise that the government - instead of building on an existing system and using that as a jumping off point -- is hiring consultants at $3,000 a day to come up with a model," Horwath said.

There's no reason the eCHN could not be used as a model for Ontario's adult population -- "they're all people" -- and the province has twice taken a close look at the network in the past, said Szende.

"Over the years they have looked at using us as kind of a model or platform base for something for the whole population, and a couple of times they've come pretty close, but they've never actually taken the plunge," he said.

"Back in 2003 and 2006 or so they looked at it very closely and they thought that's what they wanted to do, and then nothing happened."

EHealth said the electronic Children's Health Network is an imporant component of a complete electronic health record system, but doesn't include drug information and is far too small to simply be expanded for all Ontarians and their health-care providers.

"When you start talking about a provincial system where we're going to have a couple of hundred thousand points of presence with small community mental health organizations, independent providers, that interface model doesn't really work," said eHealth acting vice-president Doug Tessier.

"ECHN is an important, valuable piece for pediatrics for sure, but it's not really capable of (serving) the whole province." Health Minister David Caplan was unavailable to comment Wednesday or Thursday, but a spokesman said creating electronic health records for every Ontario resident that all their doctors can access is "an immense project" that poses incredible technological challenges.

"It's not like just turning on a switch. You can't just plug it in," said Health Ministry spokesman Greg Dennis.

"It's definitely in review and we are definitely looking at how it might apply to the overall system."

EHealth Ontario has been rocked by a growing scandal over $16 million in untendered consulting contracts given out in less than a year, and expense claims filed by some of those well-paid consultants who billed taxpayers extra for snacks and beverages.

The government paid eHealth's former CEO, Sarah Kramer, $317,000 in severance after just months on the job when it asked her to leave during the summer as more and more details of the scandal emerged.

Auditor General Jim McCarter's report on his investigation into eHealth is expected by the end of this month, and will likely provide more ammunition for the opposition to use against the government.

EHealth was set up just last fall to replace Smart Systems for Health, which spent more than $650 million to create electronic health records but produced so little of value it was quietly shut down by the Liberals and replaced with the new agency.