Thank you all very much.
My concern has always been that the technology is there to actually help us do this right away. If we look to the veterans administration in the United States, from the worst care in the country to the best care in the country, most of that was transformed because of their insistence on an electronic health record in a hurry.
I have huge concerns that even though the technology is prepared and able to encrypt the data, the examples that keep being used around privacy are ones where the data was not encrypted, and that privacy bogeyman keeps getting in the way of our getting on with what we need to do.
If we remind ourselves of Judith Maxwell's very important work during the Romanow commission on what patients and Canadians think about privacy, where they are more than willing to let their family doctor let the consultant know what's going on, we have been hindered sometimes by various health professions not wanting their prescribing practices tracked, as opposed to the patients, who actually do want to know whether their information being shared without the identifiers on it could make a safer system. I think most Canadians would want to be part of that.
If we go forward—and we heard in this committee last week that it's the written prescription that means the diagnosis can't be put on it, because it's a scrappy piece of paper that can fly anywhere and have the diagnosis and the prescription on it—I would want to know, first from the Privacy Commissioner but also from Infoway, can we and could we, if we had the resources, go immediately to electronic prescribing that included the diagnosis, which would actually help us with off-label prescribing and would help us with everything from recalling a drug to all the things that we are worried about in this real-world safety, of what we're talking about in post-market surveillance?