My name is Dr. Ken Milne. I'm a full-time rural physician in Goderich, Ontario. I'm also chief of staff at South Huron Hospital. I'm also a professor at the University of Waterloo, McMaster University, and the University of Western Ontario. I've been doing research for 30 years now.
I'd like to leave the committee with only three things. There are just three things I want you guys to walk out of here with.
The first is, I want to bust up a myth. I know there are some other doctors in the room, but there's a myth out there that intelligence is inversely related to the distance you are from an academic centre. I'm sorry, but it's a myth. We have really smart people in the rural areas, and really smart physicians in the rural areas. That's the first thing. I'm glad I got that out of the way.
Second, rural centres can be academic centres of excellence. We are providing great care in rural areas. I'll use one example. I'm leaving the committee with 20 research papers that Gateway has done in the last three years to say that we can prove this. We have data that can prove that we are rural aces. We are rural academic centres of excellence. For example, you have a heart attack, you have the Ottawa Heart Institute here. The door-to-needle time is how fast you need to get that heart attack treated, to get that liquid Drano to open up that heart. No centre has ever published anything less than 60 minutes. The gold standard is 30. For the hospitals in our area, of 100 consecutive patients, it's 24 minutes.
If anybody is having chest pain right now, I suggest you go to a rural hospital. We will see you quickly, and we will treat you well, and we have the evidence to prove that.
Third is health innovation, which is why we're here today. One thing on health innovation, and Feng brought it up earlier, is hand-held technology. We have a validated tool using the iPhone, the smart phone, to assess people's health literacy. Health literacy equals health outcome. The more literate you are, the better your health is, especially in chronic disease management, such as diabetes, COPD, those things. if you are health literate, you have a better health outcome.
However, to assess somebody's health literacy, doctors use big words from time to time, and they can be confusing. How literate are our patients? We can assess your health literacy with an app in 10 seconds. I could go around this committee and peg people at less than grade 3 level—oh, sorry, nobody in this room—grades 3 to 6, grades 6 to 9, or greater than grade 9. I could do this in 10 seconds using a hand-held app with voice recognition. We can target these chronic diseases with the front-line health workers going out to the patients to say that they don't want to see Dr. Milne in the emergency department. That's bottom-of-the-cliff technology, bottom-of-the-cliff management. It's expensive for me to catch them falling off the cliff. What you want is me up there telling them to back away from the cliff, but we have to be able to talk English or French, not doctor. There's health literacy through an app.
That's only half the problem. The other half of the problem is the physicians. How do we get physicians to practise evidence-based medicine, with the highest quality of evidence, so that their patients, because that's whom we care about, get the best possible care? We want everyone in Saskatchewan to get the best possible care, don't we? Well, how do rural physicians give that care?
We can use social media as a disruptive technology. We're going to start podcasting the evidence that we're creating on a program called JOG, just out of the gate. We're going to take information just out of the gate, critically review it from an evidence-based standpoint, get it out to those front-line physicians, and turn medical education on its head. It's no longer going to be the grey hairs and no hairs trickling down; we're going to give it to the front-line workers and let it bubble up organically from the rural physicians, from the rural researchers. We're going to treat rural patients to keep them out of rural hospitals, so they're really healthy. That's what we're trying to do.
That's the end, other than to say that I hope I busted up a myth.
Are you going to remember those three things?
I'm counting on you, Dr. Fry.