Evidence of meeting #60 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was e-health.
A recording is available from Parliament.
October 25th, 2012 / 12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Telemedicine Network
Your question about outcomes and patients is very good. I just wanted to make you aware of tele-homecare, which to me is a very exciting area. What is happening in that field is we're looking for patients who are quite ill, with congestive heart failure, chronic pulmonary disease, and putting remote monitoring technology into their home and matching them up with a nurse, who's their coach. What that nurse is doing is empowering that patient to look after himself or herself. Usually, the patient goes to see the doctor. The doctor tells the patient to lose some weight, stop smoking, do whatever. The patient leaves really not knowing what to do.
These patients have serious problems. When they have a coach, they set targets together. A target might be that they want to play with their grandchildren more but they don't have the energy. The nurse will set a target with the patient to make that happen. The outcome is dramatic. These patients are energized. They've avoided two-thirds of their hospitalizations, which is enormous in our pilot program, and 70% of their emergency visits.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Thank you, Dr. Brown.
I know we're out of time, but very quickly, Dr. Fry had one more question about privacy.
Could you please speak to that, Mr. Alvarez?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
Absolutely. Privacy is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it's extraordinarily important. Again, in the projects we fund we insist that it is built up. We have privacy by design right at the front. We insist on a privacy audit for any of the projects we fund. That must be done to make sure that it's there.
That said, when we survey Canadians, Canadians basically want their information shared by those who need to get access to it. If it's unauthorized access, they want to be notified. We want to make sure there are privacy audits that are built into the system for unauthorized access.
The last point I'll make, the other side of the coin is that privacy should not be a smokescreen for not sharing data. This, Madam Fry, takes us to your point about the different clinicians who now need to work with a patient. They need to have access to that data, so it shouldn't be held back because of aspects of privacy concerns as a smokescreen.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Thank you very much.
I want to thank the committee for all your extraordinarily good questions. We had a lot of witnesses today and they were very concise and really gave us a lot of very good information.
We are going to go into a business meeting which will be in camera. I'll ask everybody to vacate the room. Thanks for your attendance at our committee meeting. I'll suspend for two minutes.
[Proceedings continue in camera]
