Health committee  On progressive licensing?.

Health committee  The bottom line is that the provinces are paying both for the benefits and the consequences of not doing such a great job at evaluating things. They either do the foot-dragging approach of gee, this is pretty expensive and I don't really know, and I can't control it, and whatever

Health committee  Adverse drug-related events were estimated to be about the sixth leading cause of mortality. It's vastly underestimated by chart review studies because you're only picking up the ones you recognize and you're only doing it within the hospital. I think that's a big thing. It's lik

Health committee  Absolutely. One of the most interesting studies was on L-tryptophan, which was a natural food product. The ingredients it was made with, by one manufacturer, actually produced a very rare condition called eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. In fact, a Japanese company made that produ

Health committee  I think so.

Health committee  It's not a good idea, mainly because there will be a false security from thinking you'll get more. You probably will get more, but we've learned something from public health. There are declarable, mandatory reportable diseases, such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, and malaria. There

Health committee  The repositories...right now, by and large, the pharmacies are all electronic. They're all computerized. It's good for their business. They do online adjudication of drugs--what am I going to pay for it, yada yada yada. So they're pretty much computerized. So now it's just a matt

Health committee  That's a tough one. I'll just take a few things I think we've learned from other countries. The one thing that for sure seems to be driving rapid adoption is that you're somehow paying for quality. And then you need to ask, well, where are my diabetics? Have I actually done thei

Health committee  My take on this is that there is a very elegant way of doing this, which is that you connect the warning to the drug at the time it's prescribed. Every drug actually has a unique identifier in Canada. It's nationwide. We're in a delightful situation when it comes to drugs--low-ha

Health committee  This is what's interesting about it. What we've done in Canada is we've had a very technology-driven solution, which has put together the vaults of repositories. We're state of the art when it comes to that, but what we haven't dealt with is asking what the user wants. So the cou

Health committee  On the speed issue, I just want to say that you're either dragging your feet just to drag your feet because you want other countries to actually try it on their populations first and experiment, or you're going to say that you want to have something in the pre-market trials that

Health committee  I think it was an exciting new opportunity to prevent cervical cancer in kids, young girls. I think we lost sight a little bit of the fact that we didn't have a post-vaccine surveillance program in place. I think that was a terrible shame, that in fact the medication was funded w

Health committee  There are two issues there. One is what you ideally want if you are going to pay for a drug. If you're a drug benefits manager in a province, you want to know whether it's worth it for you to pay for the drug. You essentially want to know whether that drug is going to reduce your

Health committee  Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here, and I'm really delighted that our government is taking this initiative to examine progressive licensing and pharmaco-surveillance. I think it is such a low-hanging fruit, a sure-win proposition, that I'm just thrilled to be here.