You've really hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what we're trying to do in cardiac care.
Together, cardiac care and cancer are the leading causes of death, and the two situations together actually cost the Canadian taxpayers 80% of the health care dollars, which are spent on treating the burden of those two diseases.
For cancer, there is a reporting system. For cardiac care, we don't have a quality reporting system that is transparent and pan-Canadian, in all provinces. When a new technology comes out, the example would be the report I showed, transcatheter aortic valve implantations. It's a fancy new treatment. Every valve costs $25,000. It's really expensive. Currently, it's reserved for elderly people. We actually analyzed the results to see if this brand new, really expensive technology was working. Was it effective? How much money did it cost? Did the people really live longer? Did they feel better, and so on?
Over five years, the Public Health Agency of Canada put in approximately $7 million to get this system up and running so that we could answer those questions for all areas of cardiac care, whether it be heart failure or cardiac surgery. For a very small amount of money, $2.5 million each year, we can keep this system going. We can grow it and answer more questions such as why is it that indigenous people do poorly.
If we don't measure things, we can't see what's wrong and we can't then go look and find out why it's wrong. It's great value for money.