Thank you for that question.
One of the biggest challenges we have is making sure that we respond to situations quickly in communities. Many of the first nation reserves or Inuit communities have nursing stations; they don't have hospitals. One of the biggest cost factors we deal with, before we even provide services, is flying patients to hospitals from remote communities—northern Ontario to southern Ontario, Iqaluit to Ottawa, Rankin to Winnipeg, or what have you. We face a number of challenges in getting patients there.
One of the things we're doing is investing in telehealth in the north, so that physicians or nurse practitioners have access to specialists in southern hospital settings to provide advice or make decisions on whether a person requires hospital service or not. Another is investing in X-rays that we can be sending to hospitals immediately, rather than flying people down to the hospitals to be seen. That can sometimes take some time because of weather, flight schedules, and whatnot. These investments in some areas are reducing costs and dependency on transportation, which we can invest in other areas. We're looking at those types of initiatives.
But in everything we do, technology will become a more integral part of how we ensure, in primary health care settings, that patients have access to the services we see in city-centred areas, such as here in Ottawa. We're looking at these options to make sure that we have great services in our communities.