Health committee  I agree with that. We have some discretionary funding for IT every year and we look at different projects. A good example is the one I talked about earlier where we're pushing out information to family physician offices. We would identify whether or not it was going to improve ac

Health committee  I can give one example, and it ties in with the orthopedic discussion we're currently having. There has been a lot of research around hip fractures and the impact on outcomes based on how quickly you set a hip fracture. By assessing patients and taking them into the OR within 48

Health committee  In our case, where I work, we have 22 hospitals, five of which do hip fractures. What we did was we brought those five hospitals together and said let's look at hip fractures from a system point of view instead of our individual patients. So if someone has a hip fracture outside

Health committee  One that's not very sexy, I suppose, is around transcription and using remote transcription, which has lowered our costs in the health records area and allows us to reinvest those dollars back into the organization. It's taking advantage of a new technology that does reduce your

Health committee  It's an excellent point. One of things we are doing with some of the savings we've realized is actually paying for Internet into the house, because you do have that problem, that accessibility issue. Going back to the question earlier about how we adopt the cloud technology, a

Health committee  It's a Canadian grading standard to identify how far along you are in adopting electronic health records. They look at how many areas of the organization are electronic. They look at the level of complexity of the systems, how integrated those are, and they score you. The major

Health committee  The biggest challenge stems from not having consistent standards at all the sites. That's something we have tried to do, and I'm sure that NORTH Network is the same with its MEDITECH platform. When we introduce an IT system, you have to say to organizations that everyone is going

Health committee  That would come out of our operating budget. It would be an identified need the organization has, and then we would go through a competitive process to identify a vendor. One of the challenges we face with information technology adoption is the funding. It typically has not been

Health committee  Obviously, treating people with rare diseases is hugely important, and I think the system has other areas that need to be focused on to find efficiencies. In Ontario, there's a major initiative currently looking at the high users in the system, not those who have true needs but

Health committee  Even though I work in the health care sector, I will say to anybody who listens that the most important part of our health care system is our primary care, the health promotion, disease prevention components. I think if you look at some of the initiatives we're doing, one is aime

Health committee  Okay. The bottom line of this little piece is that the recruitment and retention of health care professionals in the absence of technology is almost impossible in today's environment. They expect the tools to be available, and if they're not, they'll seek out communities where t

Health committee  I'm not a doctor, actually.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today. As you mentioned, my name is Andrew Williams, and I am the president and chief executive officer of the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance. We call it the HPHA. We represent four hospitals located in southwestern Ontar