Currently in Ontario there are no specific arrangements with respect to out-of-hospital facilities and provincial government funding, except that we can perform publicly funded procedures and bill for the procedural fee alone. So that's currently the state of out-of-hospital facilities.
But I do acknowledge that there are several countries now performing publicly funded procedures such as hernia, thyroid surgery, and my specialty in an out-of-hospital facility while receiving public funding. I believe that this is a model for the future. The provincial government in Ontario has already expressed in several press releases that it would like to see more and more procedures performed in out-of-hospital facilities. Two examples are cataract surgery and endoscopy. However, with the current model, if we were to take on the large volume of publicly funded cases and only bill the procedural fee, we would go bankrupt. That's the stark reality. I'd love to do it, altruistically speaking, but the funding just isn't there for the majority of publicly funded procedures.