First of all, we want to make sure we do not have the barriers that the proposed reforms to the PMPRB would have, and that is to discourage countries from coming in.
I think we want to talk about having a national program that would allow us to bring in all of those patients. The numbers are small, so we're not going to be able to....
Most of these drugs have to come into specialty clinics, so we have a proposal for a rare disease strategy that would also include centres of excellence. They would include the ability to do what we call a life-cycle approach. We can bring in the drugs. We can identify early on, as we're bringing them in, which patients are going to be immediately eligible—like those with ALS—and which ones are not at all going to be eligible, set up a monitoring program for them to have access to it, and then over time, as we are learning from those patients who are on it....
In the old days, we would call it post-market monitoring. As Cathy talked about, under the new bill, Bill C-17, we can enforce those kinds of post-market monitoring programs that we can learn from.
We have a lot of tools at our disposal and, quite frankly, we do not necessarily need to invent them. We can look at some of the model programs we've put together. Canada knows how to do this. We already have these kinds of monitoring programs with very specific drugs, but we want to be able to make that the standard, make it so we can do it nationally, which we don't necessarily do well, and then not wait until we've gone through two more years of negotiations before we implement it.
We know how to do it. We just need to make sure we put that template in place and have the specialty clinics that are there also able to support the use of them, and, as she talked about, the administration of them, and the ongoing data collection to make sure they're used appropriately and, at the end of the day, price readjustment.