Sure. I'd be happy to.
Of course a big part of innovation is research, and we're the largest single investor in health research in Canada, obviously, investing close to a billion dollars a year through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. These funding commitments result in about 13,000 innovative health researchers doing great work across this country. But of course related to that are 10,000 different projects. When you look at this kind of research, you see advances in care around dementia, cancer research, HIV/AIDS, and many other things.
Obviously research has a great deal to do with making sure we're going in the right direction when we look at inputting money into particular best practices or standards of care or innovative technologies. So I'm pleased that we're making progress on that front. Of course, outside of CIHR, we've also invested a great deal of money into neuroscience research, and we see quite a bit of work being done there.
I think one of the best examples of innovation happening among the provinces, the federal government, post-secondary institutions, and research institutions is the strategy for patient-oriented research, which is designed to ensure that patients receive the right treatment at the right time. It puts research into the hands of health care providers. It's what health care providers want, and it focuses on health challenges that are identified by the provinces and territories themselves. We then use research to bridge that gap and support them.
These have been excellent projects. At the FPT table in October, there was unanimous support to continue doing this kind of collaborative work, so in the budget we renewed funding for strategic patient-oriented research, which is a very innovative way of approaching work we can do with the provinces. We have to continue to do that. The provinces and territories and I agree that we should keep working on an innovation framework to look at how we can share best practices across the country, identify excellence in different parts of the health care system, and build on those.
There is a lot of good work being done. I'm very optimistic. I know that people have a lot of negative experiences sometimes in the health care system, but I think we can take those and turn them into positives if we can identify where things went wrong. I do sense from the provinces that they are very keen to work on innovation. They're doing this work with us on the strategic patient-oriented research. We'll continue to do that, and we're going to look for other ways we can partner with them and with research institutions to target that level of excellence. We want good research, but we also want really good patient outcomes, which is what this kind of strategy is about.