Of course, there's a federal institution, which I think is the Canada Health Infoway, which has been providing money and advice, and they've taken the benefits of work in different parts of the country.
It's clearly an area that should have a uniform system so they can talk to each other. Obviously, one of the benefits of an electronic health record is that it could be accessible anywhere. If your record is sitting in B.C., but you're injured in Ontario or something happens and you need the record, it's really important that it's accessible. That would be one of the major benefits.
If you're trying to understand how well certain kinds of medications are working, what the costs really are, and where there are areas of higher cost, there are an enormous number of questions you can answer with an electronic medical record.
The questions that are still of concern have to do with rules of access. In a lot of cases, the simple rules of access will be straightforward. If you're a doctor and you are of a certain category, you can access things at a certain level.
It means information will have to be structured in terms of different levels of sensitivity. It will therefore require different levels of access by physicians, government bureaucrats, ministers, associate ministers, and deputy ministers of health on the kind of information they can get and the permission level they will be at.
As I said, these things are currently being discussed.
I think this is really important. It will obviously affect PIPEDA, because it will regulate these things for the provinces without any other privacy legislation.
I think it goes back to the question on whether we should wait. I don't think we're going to wait. There is such urgency with medical records that we're not going to wait.
For whatever measures are taken in the provinces, I assume provinces that don't have their own legislation will look very carefully at what's going on elsewhere in Canada as they formulate policies of use.