One of the areas that we have focused a lot on is remote patient monitoring. In the information that we supplied to you is a study that was done by HEC, École des Hautes Études Commerciales, on the benefits of remote patient monitoring and the implementation of e-solutions.
What you would have seen in the video is a patient using a terminal at home. This patient is discharged from the hospital, is assigned a care plan, and is asked to follow this care plan. In this case, we did a study on patients who were suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The study from the HEC shows that by providing the terminals and the care plans, we've actually decreased the number of admissions to emergency by 34% and the total cost of hospitalizations by 66%. The study is there. I think the study is available in both official languages. It's a good example of how you can get the patient more involved in his treatment and drive lower costs in the system.
In the video we also have two different patients using a personal health record.
In one case, we are doing a project with the Lawson Health Research Institute relating to mental health. We started with 200 patients who are suffering from a form of mental illness, schizophrenia in most cases, and we supplied them with a personal health record. That personal health record is configured in such a way that the provider as well as the patient, obviously, have access to the record. The patient enters his symptoms during the day and exchanges information with a physician. The outcome has been one where in many cases the testimonies from the doctors have been around the fact that they've moved treatment forward. In some cases, having a patient on the system, after two or three weeks, they've gathered more information on that patient's mood and issues than they have had in six months of treatment. That's another example of how the personal health record comes into play.
The other example that we have on the video is where we've partnered with University Health Network to build an application called “bant”. We've enabled a personal record which sits behind bant. In this case the trial was with young adolescents with type I diabetes. What we've seen is that by supplying them with a personal health record, we've increased the amount of readings these adolescents are taking on a daily basis, how many times they're checking the blood glucose levels, by about 100% and their A1C levels have been reduced over time. That study is also available.
One area that we're extremely focused on going forward is the notion of collaboration. When we look at the health care ecosystem, one of the key elements is how you connect the various players in this health ecosystem so that we're sharing information along the health ecosystem, and how we put in place increased collaboration among the various players along the health ecosystem.
We introduced either personal health records, and in many cases, patient portal solutions, where the patient can go in, for example with various pharmacy chains, and sign up on a portal and get electronic refills of their prescriptions, monitor their medications, and set reminders for taking their medications. These solutions started out with two small regional pharmacy chains in Quebec and we're up to hundreds of thousands of people who have signed up for it. We've performed over 1.3 million electronic refills over those solutions, with only two pharmacy chains.
I guess one of the key messages to the committee is that not only do we have to connect the various players and providers in the health ecosystem, but we also have to enable the patient to play a more active role. Whenever we've provided solutions whereby the patient can play a more active role, patients are willing to embark on doing this because they're doing this in other walks of life.