Thank you.
As was mentioned, the federal Auditor General did an audit of Infoway. While no audit is ever perfect, I think the Auditor General found that Infoway was largely on the right track. A few recommendations were made with respect to some of its management practices. Infoway did issue a management response and action plan to move forward on those recommendations. On that basis, in budget 2010 the government freed up the $500 million that was part of the economic action plan for Infoway.
A lot has been accomplished. I can give you a sense of some of the initiatives with respect to moving toward the benefits of electronic health records. Three-quarters of X-ray films--this applies to anybody who's ever had to go to a hospital and wait for X-rays, even though X-rays may have been taken before--have been replaced by digitized images in the public health system. So the accessibility of those X-rays, the reduction of needless duplication, I think is a very important part of this.
The development of drug information systems, which are a key building block of electronic health records, are in place in B.C., Alberta, P.E.I., and Saskatchewan, and that's really important. I think one of the main benefits of the electronic health record is getting information that will avoid error. If you can get a sense of what has been prescribed and what contraindications are, and avoid some of the written script where there are errors in terms of interpreting it by pharmacists, I think that's an important benefit of an electronic health record.
All communities north of 60 degrees are telehealth-enabled, or are in the process of implementing telehealth capabilities. Again, given the nature of Canada and the remoteness of a lot of our communities, the importance of having access to telehealth is huge.
In Alberta, 20,000 authorized health care providers are actively using the electronic health record, and this has helped Alberta start to implement a chronic disease management system.
Those are just some of the examples. Infoway continues to work with the provinces and territories. The Auditor General found a very prudential funding arrangement. It needs to see real proof of sound implementation plans before money will flow to the provinces and territories.