Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to focus on what both witnesses have been presenting us with today, which is that innovation is not necessarily about using a piece of technology, that innovation is about creative ways of thinking, creative ways of delivering health care, and creative ways for making a more cost-effective and efficient system that provides quality care. I think that's what we're talking about.
You've brought forward ideas for innovation in the delivery of health care.
I must say, Dr. MacDonald, that you made an excellent case for what I think we've all been talking about for the last 50 years, which is the fact that 60% of disease is preventable and that if we moved to a prevention model we would be able to create healthier populations that wouldn't require health care, etc. That was in the past, but currently we are dealing with people who are chronically ill. We have increasing numbers of people with diabetes, as you said, and with heart disease, etc. I just wanted to congratulate you on bringing forward that innovation in terms of looking at the innovative way of dealing with healthy populations, which is looking at prevention, etc.
Dr. Raza, one of the things that interested me was that you talked a lot about the health accord. I know that the delivery of health care is a provincial jurisdiction, in other words, who delivers it, when, and where the health care is delivered, etc., but the accord brought together what is known as a transformative change and an agreement for cooperation between jurisdictions. That was what made the 2004 health care accord remarkable: premiers and the Prime Minister agreed that they were going to look at a flexible delivery of health care, and there were places where the federal government had a huge role to play, such as health human resources, pharmacare, etc.
In that accord, a big chunk of one of the objectives was looking at new ways of delivering health care. The federal government was indeed instrumental in putting money into that in terms of looking at community care clinics. I've been to some in Calgary, and I've been to some across the country, in which, as you said, it was a multidisciplinary model where people were looking at taking care of the chronically ill at the community level and therefore decreasing the amount of hospital admissions, and therefore costs, etc.
I just wanted to ask you about your e-consultation model. How exactly would that work? Would it mean that somebody would have to examine the patient physically, or would it be merely an e-consultation working on simple symptoms, etc.? How exactly would that work to ensure that diagnoses are made based on the examination of patients as well as talking to patients?