Evidence of meeting #72 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was companies.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
I'm agreeing with you 100% so far. What's going to change the public's view?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Health Technology Exchange
Education, I think, is about the only thing that's going to change the public's view. I'm involved with the Public Policy Forum, the Conference Board of Canada, and a number of other groups that are trying to hold forums to get people to understand that our health care systems are just insurance plans, that they're just coverage plans. They're not part of Canadian DNA in our blood. They're just insurance plans, and they can be improved. There are better health care system components in the world that we need to adopt.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Is it about trigger words, like public health care is good, private health care is bad?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Health Technology Exchange
Absolutely, it's that kind of ignorance, yes.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Well, if there's one message that I think should get out, that's it.
I still have a couple of minutes. We have a really good little garage in Edmonton called TEC Edmonton. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's a great collaboration of the University of Alberta, and there are about 100 different companies being incubated there. It's not just medical technology; it's broad-based technology. I'm there quite often doing funding announcements, because we do invest in those things.
One of the things they've found is that the biggest challenge is not necessarily the technology; it's getting it to market, as we've talked about.
There's a lot of cross-talk between and among those 100 or so companies not just about their individual technology—they all work in a big area, and they have their individual offices, but they also have a lot of common areas—but collaborating on best business practices.
I'm going to pose an obvious question. How important is it to not just stay within the medical technology field, but in technology generally, with business practices that would benefit everybody?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Health Technology Exchange
I'd say it a little differently. What they need or what they lack is experienced people who have carried these companies through that process before. In Massachusetts you might have 20 of them sitting on the bench with really big experience, so if you're starting a new company, you can pick one of those 20. You might have only one or two in Canada who have the kind of expertise that, say, a diagnostics company needs in oncology.
We need to attract those people back to Canada by creating stuff like MaRS and what HTX is building and what you're building in Alberta, so that they have somewhere to come home to, so they know that if one company fails, there are many other companies, etc. We're trying to build that infrastructure to attract them back and get more management talent.
Also, if they have more money, they can get more management talent.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Mr. Hawn.
We'll now go to Dr. Fry.
Liberal
Hedy Fry Liberal Vancouver Centre, BC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
We should expand this to a six-hour session, because it's as if everything just jumps onto something else, and you have to move on.
I want to go back to this issue of.... We in Canada are quite innovative in terms of biomedical research. We're very innovative, and the fact that we cannot take advantage of our own innovations because of the gap that exists from the test tube or the laboratory to the hospitals and offices, and to looking at how we change the way we deliver health care.... And it's not merely about widgets, a new drug or a new piece of technology; I'm thinking of innovative ways of how to deliver health care.
There are so many ways. You touched on something. While it's purely a provincial jurisdiction, the ability for them to decide how their hospitals are run and the budgeting of hospitals, it actually squeezes hospitals into this very linear thing. As you say, if you move a patient out faster, then you have to put another patient in, so it doesn't leave room for any kind of incentive for a hospital to be budgeted on how it innovates. I think if we could move those forward....
Even though it's a provincial jurisdiction, there is a real role for the federal government to play in taking a leadership place at the table. When it talks to ministers of health provincially, the federal government might want to talk about how transfer payments reward provinces that are moving in innovative ways to improve efficiency, to improve cost-effectiveness, to improve outcomes.
I think there is a role, so I don't want to write the federal government out of this. Again, while how a hospital is run is clearly provincial, we all know there is the ability to shift our system into a way that makes it able to sustain itself. I would like to hear from you.
Madam Chair, I know there's a witness who's going to come and talk about how you actually shift that global funding of hospitals and how you make hospitals budget differently, etc.
Do you have any comment on how you see this unfolding and where the government can play a role in incentives? Do you have any idea how those incentives would work?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Health Technology Exchange
Not in the broader sense, but even in a more narrow sense without trying to change the way the world works, FedDev, the federal government funding agency in Ontario, and other federal funding agencies that provide incentives and those kinds of funding programs can be used as alternate funding programs to allow companies and others to introduce technologies into hospitals.
You don't have to interfere with the provincial health care systems, but you can have a dramatic impact on their ability to test and try new technologies. If you do it in one place, and you do it in such a way that other places in the country become aware of it and hear about that technology, or perhaps participate in the pilot, in other words if you encourage people from multiple provinces to participate in a pilot, then I think that could have a significant effect.
Chief Executive Officer, MaRS Discovery District
I would I agree with that. I think the trick is to create a pod that is dedicated specifically to this kind of activity.
Part of our challenge right now is that our commercialization funding lives in our granting councils, and so it typically goes to academics who are doing a little bit more of the same, maybe a little bit more towards the market. Then at the other end Technology Partnerships Canada was awarding large companies, often not for being that innovative.
Creating an agency that could take the long-term view, and therefore perhaps also fund some of these more social innovations in the health care delivery systems as well as prevention innovations but which would be very specifically targeted at rewarding innovation, I think, would be a very interesting national catalytic role that would drive behaviour.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joy Smith
I'm sorry, but I promised you we would have time at the end of the meeting, and we will.
We have to thank the witnesses very much. This has been so interesting. I have to agree with Dr. Fry that we need about six hours for something like this.
Your testimony has been amazing, and I want to thank you. The whole committee wants to thank you for coming today.
Having said that, we're going to suspend for two minutes and we're going to have to ask people to clear the room, because we do have to go into a business meeting shortly.
[Proceedings continue in camera]