For the amount of money that we cost the Canadian taxpayers and the government and for the importance of heart disease, as one in 12 Canadians have it, I would say that it's almost irresponsible to not know that we are offering treatments that are cost-effective. It is crazy for people to be staying in hospital for 12 days after their aortic valve replacement in one centre while other hospitals are sending them home in two days.
Those who were keeping people 12 days, which was costing I don't know how much money per day, didn't know that there was a better way of doing it until we produced reports, in English and in French, that real practitioners could read and then say, “Oh, my gosh, look at that. B.C. is sending them home in one day, so let's find out how they do that.”
Whenever we give information they care about to the providers, as soon as they see that their centre is not as good as another centre, it immediately triggers an audit. They look at the charts. They look at the cases. They call a meeting and they figure out how to do it better. The few things that we've done with the start-up money we had from the Public Health Agency of Canada are publicly available and you can look at the website and see whether your centre is doing well or not.
We take in this information that we get and we have workshops to teach the providers how to do things better.