Mr. Chair, let me speak first to the approach. I've been in health care for nearly 25 to 30 years, both at the provincial and at the national level, and I've never seen as high a level of cooperation between the federal government, the provinces, and the territories as around this initiative.
The example I gave is that at one point in time, and not so long ago, with the exception of PharmaNet in B.C., where they were collecting information on all drugs and all people and giving it to the pharmacists to do the kind of work we're talking about on adverse drug events.... That was a 10-year-old project, and it never ever took off anywhere else in Canada. Today, it's now going to be right across Canada, adopting very much the same designs. And it's the same for the labs and the diagnostic imaging. It's the same for the architecture. All of the provinces and territories are coming together. And we've been using federal dollars to leverage their dollars, as well.
So in this arena, we don't have a program that goes into health surveillance. So there could well be a program started around post-surveillance that will have a common design, because you're going to need to be able to get a critical mass of as much data as you can; you're going to be looking at trends across the country. So there is a way, from a leadership perspective, to build this on a national basis, where the jurisdictions do collaborate with the federal government and others.
In terms of the EHR as a surveillance tool, as I said in my remarks, there is enormous potential, as long as it's done right from a privacy perspective.