Health committee  The comment is that organizations like research hospitals need to be responsible for moving these forward. We have some scientists who are good entrepreneurs, who can raise money, who come up with the idea, and have taken products straight through to being sold in the clinic—the

Health committee  I will just say that we've heard of push and pull, and both things happen. We have scientists who work with industry because they want to make one of their machines better, and we have the engineers who can do that. Some of our most successful products right now are software impr

Health committee  Much less so than what you might think, for two reasons. One is, in this age of Internet and PubMed searches, one really has at one's disposal a vast body of information from all around the world. At the research level, I think you really are aware of what's going on. When you g

Health committee  Again, I sound like a broken record. There's not just one way of doing it. Access to venture capital is good, and the higher the risk venture capitalists are willing to take, the more they're going to look at us. But we want to de-risk our products for them, and that's where gove

Health committee  I would totally agree that the industry is stronger than people think it is, but I will still talk about my disappointment in seeing potentially very important products not receiving funding at that level between when the academic funds stop and when they're de-risked enough for

Health committee  This is a really important set of questions, but I would say that no one size fits all. It depends a lot on the company. The model that's been presented is an excellent model where both services and products can be developed. Sometimes we have start-ups where that's not possible.

Health committee  In a hospital sector there's much less teaching involved. They do a little bit of teaching, but it's mostly research. It's not all research on what they're discovering.

Health committee  This is really an excellent question. My response would be that the government should not think there's just one thing that government can do to solve the problem. It's a complex problem at many levels, and the federal government can be effective at several. We've mentioned infra

Health committee  My proposal, which I've written about, is that if we had these credentialled hospitals and they had the infrastructure, the provinces would start funding those because they would start saving money as these health innovations change the health budgets. I think that has to be seed

Health committee  No. A lot of these things have huge commercial value. If you can de-risk it to the point where the private sector will take it, they have huge commercial value.

Health committee  I'd love to see the Business Development Bank of Canada step into that. We'd be partnering with biotech companies that exist here already. We do a lot of partnering already. This is not something that happens exclusively inside the hospitals.

Health committee  It's helping, but there are still many more projects that need that early stage funding than we have access to.

Health committee  As you probably know, hospitals actually can't spend their health budget on research, so we have to find funds from other sources to build the research laboratories, to equip them, to hire the scientists, engineers, and physicists, and to protect time for clinicians to work in th

Health committee  Well, the hospital facility isn't there either—not to do the research. In some cases, you're right, if it's a clinical trial, the facility is there. But in many cases, you need additional diagnostic services, additional laboratory services, additional pharmacy services. You need

Health committee  My recommendations have it being shared with other partners. But someone has to fund it.