Bonjour, Madam Chair and members of the standing committee.
Thank you for this opportunity to appear in front of you. With me is Mike Sheridan, our chief operating officer.
It's a real privilege to be on with some of the best clinical innovators that Canada has. I'm very grateful to all of these gentlemen for what they've done.
Canada Health Infoway was created with the unanimous agreement of first ministers to invest in digital health and telehealth systems to improve the quality, access, and productivity of our health care systems. Infoway receives its funding from grants from the federal government, which we then leverage with additional financing from provincial and territorial governments and health agencies.
In the few minutes I have for opening comments, I want to share with you three examples from independent evaluations of how these innovative investments have enabled the expansion and delivery of tools to provide better care for Canadians.
You've heard a great deal from Dr. Brown. I think he's somewhat modest, because the telehealth system he runs is, in fact, one of the finest telehealth systems in the world. It is a way of providing services when patients and clinicians aren't in the same place. We've seen that it's reduced wait times and increased access to care, particularly in the north.
A recent study found that Canada has the world's largest video conferencing network, with more than 5,700 telehealth sites in 1,200 communities, including 423 sites in northern, remote, first nations, and Inuit communities. The result is that a quarter of a million sessions were delivered last year, keeping patients in their communities and close to their social support networks and saving them both time and money by eliminating the need to travel millions and millions of kilometres.
The use of telehealth tools has led to innovative applications in the treatment of mental health and drug addictions, the monitoring of chronic disease patients so that they can remain in their homes, remote wound care assessments for diabetics, and telephathology applications that let pathologists and surgeons communicate and exchange information in real time operating room settings.
The second area is the reducing of wait times and improving access with the use of digital diagnostic imaging, which collects, stores, manages, and shares patient X-rays, CTs, MRIs, and other images and reports. As a result of our investments, over 90% of the most common radiology exams in Canada's hospitals are now digital, up from 38% just six years ago. Research shows that radiologist and technician productivity has increased by 25%, enabling as many as 11 million more exams annually. When fully implemented, we expect annual benefits valued at about $1 billion.
However, the true innovation is when a young child in a remote community has fallen off a bicycle and can have a head injury diagnosed and assessed by a specialist in a major urban centre without having to travel, thus saving much needed time and further injury.
The third example is drug information systems which allow authorized clinicians to access, manage, and share patient medication histories, thus avoiding harmful drug interactions. They are used by one in three community pharmacists and half of the hospital emergency rooms. They help avoid harmful drug interactions and manage medications.
Research results show benefits valued at $436 million per year. Pharmacists surveyed as part of the study rated improved access to patient information, increased patient safety, reduction in fraudulent medication, and a reported 9% productivity gain as the top four benefits.
Last year, much in keeping with what this committee is doing in its investigation, we initiated and funded projects intended to stimulate and spread clinical innovation. We began by launching a website inviting Canadians to share their best ideas to improve health and health care using information technology. In a period of 13 weeks, more than 1,000 Canadians participated in the challenge.
We also launched an awards-based outcome challenge to clinical teams who demonstrate the use and growth of innovation solutions for electronic scheduling, for medication reconciliation, for patient access to their own health information, and for clinical synoptic reporting—much of what Dr. Kendall spoke about earlier.
We now have 31 teams with 300,000 users participating in the outcomes challenge. Their innovative clinical solutions have been used well over a million times.
Generally speaking, as you look across Canada, a lot of the digital infrastructure is now in place, or is in the works of coming into place over the next 18 months. It's time now to further capitalize on our collective investments and to drive out new innovation applications for consumers and clinicians.
That view was confirmed when Infoway conducted a pan-Canadian consultation with over 500 stakeholders comprising consumers, governments, administrators, clinicians, physicians, thought leaders, and researchers. The aggregated result of these consultations and opportunities pointed to five clear innovative and transformative directions for building and expanding on the successes of Infoway and the jurisdiction investments to date.
The clear message was that focus now needs to turn to the consumer by bringing care closer to home, by providing tools for making access easier, by supporting new and better patient-centric models of care, and by using technology to improve patient safety, and at the same time harvesting the electronic health information data for analysis and research to enable a high performing health care system.
Responding to the stakeholders' priorities and shifting the focus to consumers is a big cultural and management change in health care. Quite frankly, we don't get there in one step. Getting there and further harvesting the benefits from doing that will require ongoing commitments to practise improvements from thousands of dedicated clinicians across the country, continued renewal of investment, and strong alignment of legislation, regulation, and policy. We need to keep our eyes focused on the future and recognize how much more innovative digital solutions can be for Canadian health care consumers and providers.
I want to end, Madam Chair, by thanking the federal government for creating a creature such as Infoway, which is really a mechanism for you to help with the modernization of the Canadian health care system.
That concludes my remarks. Thank you.