I would absolutely agree with Dr. Lear that around the self-management issue, part of our challenge in training now is training our physicians to understand that the patient is probably going to come in with.... There are two types of patients. They come in with way more information about the specific disease than I have, or they come in saying, “Just tell me what to do, Doc”. The challenge for us as physicians in training our new generation or our next generation of physicians is to help interpret for the patients so that the patient can make the best decision that is relevant to themselves. I think that is part of the comfort, as they get more and more information from the Internet. It's putting it into context for themselves. That's probably key across the board.
The second thing that you asked about was in terms of Internet access and how we make it comfortable for the patients. How do we make it so that the patient wants to do it? One of the things we did at the maternity centre in Hamilton was give all of our pregnant patients access to their own health records and then give them targeted information. So we attached them to websites that we had vetted, we had already cleared. They came from reputable places like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, McMaster, McGill, etc. We told them what was relevant for their particular situation. That was huge. We were able to demonstrate that the amount of time they went to those sites was dramatically different from those patients who had no access to their own records. So that starts to trigger the interest in the patient.