Thank you, Madam Chair, for the questions.
In terms of cost savings, we have made significant investments in e-health, and we have seen that it can reduce travel in two ways. First, and perhaps most importantly, for patients, if we can connect them to health providers through telehealth, it may avoid a trip that may have been an overnight and certainly very disruptive for patients, but also very costly. We've looked at that in Manitoba, where we've made significant investments and we've done a bit of a study. There was also an external study done in northern Ontario, and there were significant savings.
There's a second way in which there are savings. Nurses, our staff in the communities, also need to keep their skills up. They want professional development and training. We can provide much more of that professional education and training to our staff through telehealth as well. So there are also savings in that important respect for our nurses.
With regard to Rosie the robot, I will say that the plans for this time are in fact to concentrate on things that perhaps are not quite as well known to the committee as Rosie, things that are in fact a bit less flashy, perhaps I can say. These are things like connectivity. We're looking to connect the next number of 35 new communities and provide them with clinical telehealth services. We're looking to increase the bandwidth in over 120 communities. We're looking to increase the use of mobile health technologies.
So there is this very interesting pilot with the robot, but that is at this point not planned for replication. It is a costly thing, and we have communities saying they need some of these very basic connected pieces.