Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for having us speak to you today on this important women's health issue.
At Canada Health Infoway, we want to ensure that all Canadians have equitable access to excellent health care and health information. We believe that a more connected and collaborative system is a healthier system.
Infoway brings a pan-Canadian focus to improving the patient experience, improving the health of Canadians and unlocking value for the health system. Since our founding, Infoway has been working to develop consistent standards for electronic health records and to make sure those records can be accessed securely by patients.
Canadians who have access to their personal health information have more control in managing their own health, and improving access to health information is critical in helping Canadians live healthier, happier lives. With greater access to personal health information, patients can better track and understand their overall health and conditions, better manage their health, have more informed and productive conversations with their health care providers and enjoy fewer in-person visits to a doctor or emergency room. This means better service, better patient experience and better outcomes.
By integrating digital health into the health care experience, we can unlock more efficient and accessible models of care. We can facilitate faster, more seamless and secure information sharing.
The numbers speak for themselves, and 44% of people who have accessed their personal health information said they avoided at least one in-person visit to a doctor or a hospital. The problem is that only one-third of Canadians have access to their health information electronically.
To ensure that more Canadians can access their records, Canada Health Infoway is building a pan-Canadian road map that will lay out the concrete steps that the federal government, along with the provinces and territories, will need to take to deliver a patient-centric model for safe, secure access management of health information.
To do this, Canada Health Infoway has identified a number of near-term projects that we think will help us to address these objectives. They include working to make sure patient data can be easily transferred among the various hospital, provincial and private practitioner databases safely, and building a system so that referrals and consults to specialists are streamlined.
The pan-Canadian road map will inform and guide all jurisdictions to progress toward the same standards, allowing each to do so at their own pace but ensuring a consistent standard among those jurisdictions.
Thank you to the committee for allowing Infoway the opportunity to share some of the knowledge we've gleaned from that work on an important topic such as the breast implant registry.
I look forward to answering any of your questions.
Thank you.