Thank you very much, Mr. Van Bynen. It's a very important question.
The only organization that I'm aware of in Canada that is allowed to receive data that's transported across provincial barriers is CIHI, the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Different provinces have different strategies for collecting data from hospitals and individual practices and aggregating them intraprovincially. CIHI is a very effective organization with some limitations in terms of what it is able to do, particularly in early or just-in-time data provision. They're doing it for COVID, but it would be useful for them to be able to do that with other kinds of data. Some of the limitations are regulatory, such as the challenge of sending data across provincial lines. Within provinces, there are different kinds of challenges, and they're related to the sensitivity around data privacy.
The fact is that the data custodians are the individual agencies that hold the data. For example, for cardiac data in the realm of COVID, we have data that's collected in ambulances, as I mentioned earlier, and housed inside emergency medical systems. These data are not easily interoperable, but the biggest hurdles are not the operability in terms of the IT challenges; they're that the data custodians are not in a position to talk to other data custodians to share data. They just don't feel that they have the regulatory and privacy wherewithal to be able to share data.