Right. Increasingly, I think, public health has become a data-focused discipline. I mean that how we understand processes, how we see them, really depends on the data we have. It's unfortunate, I think, that in my province, Ontario, we have a bit of a track record where we've sunk billions of dollars into data systems and famously have had very little to show for that. I think that is sort of a caution to us if we say, “Let's just throw a bunch of money at this and build some good data systems.”
We have needs on a bunch of different fronts. In terms of public health surveillance systems, we could really use some upgrades that make surveillance systems interactive, to have a kind of crosstalk across the country, a shared vocabulary, and relatively user-friendly data systems and data systems that are actually linked into.... As you know, we have national health care in Canada. It would be great if we could actually have interactivity between our public health data system and our health care data system.
On the subject of vaccines in particular, because that's what I've been thinking about in heading into this meeting, we are really patchy, and to date we have very little that has been constructed. As far as I know, the only province in Canada—and I hope I'm right about this—that has an adult vaccine registry is Prince Edward Island. I think that's it. We really don't know.
As I mentioned in my remarks, we spend half a billion dollars annually on vaccines, but we actually have no means of tracking who got them or of linking back to health records so that we could look to see whether if you're vaccinated you're less likely to be hospitalized and so forth. We're really struggling in terms of appointment systems. We don't have a good national, nimble system to monitor vaccine adverse effects, which is a really big issue with brand new vaccines.