Obviously, you need all the backup to do that, but I think that's going to come. It's probably an application that we'll eventually see.
To date, knowledge about diet and nutrition, and cancer and chronic disease prevention has been very slow to move into the mainstream practice. In our daily lives, we're all having to navigate a very complex and overwhelming amount of information when we go to grocery stores or to restaurants. Quite often, people just give up on it. They don't have the time and they just don't have the energy. It's not user friendly. It's not easy to use at this point.
An interesting example, though, is one in San Francisco, in a project called iN Touch, which used what they now call medical mobile technology to work with teenage boys who were overweight and obese and from low-income families. With the app that had been developed, along with mentorship and buddy support—and this was academically reviewed—they were able to show a strong impact and a reduction in weights. We don't have that many scientific studies yet. This, we found, was a really interesting one. We think that's something that needs a lot more work. More evaluation is needed.
I'm not going to talk about health records because I think you've heard a lot about that, but I can't believe that after all these years we still don't have interoperable, up-to-date health records, even between Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health. It's absolutely mind-boggling.
What do we think the challenges are in moving ahead?
Certainly, there are privacy challenges, and we all know that. We have to find a way of dealing with that, of protecting people's privacy but not letting that be a barrier to being able to move ahead on these issues.
We also think that quality control and evidence-informed messaging is critical. There are challenges in being able to differentiate between scientifically valid information versus that's only pop, you might say, or commercially driven. The public and other users of online information need mechanisms, protocols, and protections to help with this. Certainly, the federal government, along with other partners, could play an important role.
I remember, as some of you may, when there was that whole program on the Internet in which Health Canada was involved in helping to validate information about health that you got on the Internet. It doesn't exist anymore, but we need something like that.
We basically have two asks in terms of what we would like to see in the development of mobile medical technology in the prevention of chronic disease.
First of all, we think there's an opportunity for the federal government to encourage innovation and excellence in this area with various government departments in programs through Trade and Industry, and with Health and the Public Health Agency, and also in partnering—P3 partnerships are really critical these days—with the private sector, NGOs, and academia in the development of technologies that really will work and that are scientifically validated, which we think is so important.
The FDA in the U.S. is already regulating some of the mobile medical technology. They're regulating the ones where there is an interface with the body, the monitoring ones. Like the FDA, we think it's really important that there be that kind of regulation.
However, we don't think it's likely or possible that you can regulate every app. That's just beyond the ken, but we think there should be some system of verification. Maybe it's something like the Heart and Stroke Foundation health check program. We can put our minds together and work together, again with partners in the NGO community, to develop a program of verification that can help consumers really differentiate between all the kinds of stuff out there as to what works and what doesn't work. Of course, behind that, we need to have more scientific validation of many of the technologies that are out there.
In my generation, some of us are still a little fearful of where technology may lead us. This has been a huge change in our lives, but the reality is that it's going to continue to progress.
If we can harness the best approaches that technology can offer and blend them with the time-tested mentoring and buddying—we still think that's absolutely critical, because people need to be able to talk to other people and have their reinforcement—then we may have some real winners that will help us reduce the burden.