No—
Evidence of meeting #29 for Health in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was infoway.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #29 for Health in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was infoway.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
—was chosen to increase that—
Liberal
Doug Eyolfson Liberal Winnipeg West, MB
Yes, I know, sir. Why didn't it work?
I'm sorry that I keep cutting you off, but I keep hearing the same answer. They went to an open standards approach, but I still haven't heard why. For a program that was, by your account, working so very well, why would you change to this open standards approach? We've heard many times that the board went to this open standards approach, but I have yet to hear a concise why.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
The key reason is to improve adoption.
Liberal
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Riding Mountain, MB
The witness is not answering the question. It's a pretty simple question.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
—be subjective about why the witness is not answering the question. Maybe the witness does not comprehend. Maybe the witness does not—
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
—want to answer the question, because I have heard this question asked many times.
Mr. Green, the question from Mr. Eyolfson was pretty clear. On a scale of one to 10, you said it was an eight, yet there was a 5% to 20% uptake, with 20% in only two provinces. He asked, what was wrong with the system? Why was there such a low uptake among physicians? You decided to change it. Can you tell us what the problem was? You had to define the problem before you decided on a solution. That's what everyone is trying to get to.
Thank you.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
Certainly.
The open standards approach was chosen to improve adoption. The key reason we changed from a monolithic system to an open standards, more distributed system was to make it easier for physicians to adopt.
Liberal
Doug Eyolfson Liberal Winnipeg West, MB
I'm sorry. I understand what you're saying, but it goes back to the same....
I'm going to have to keep drilling down on this, because the question has not been answered after many attempts by many questioners.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I'm sorry. Your time is up, so you can't keep drilling.
This is getting to be a very difficult question and answer session because we are not getting the clear answers we're asking for. We're getting the same answers repetitively. We all know you moved to an open standards approach in order to help more physicians. Why did your original system not work? Why did it have such a low uptake? Was there a reason? You must have analyzed it, sir. What were your reasons?
That's what Mr. Eyolfson is trying to get from you. His time is now up. People's times are ending because they're asking one question over and over. I am asking the question this time. Mr. Eyolfson has finished, but I'm going to ask his question of you.
Can you tell us what was wrong?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
The ease of adoption among primary care physicians and prescribers was lower than expected because of the complexity of adopting the standard. It was because of the complexity, so the solution was to move to a different approach in order to solve the issue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
You are suggesting that the system, in itself, was too complex for physicians to use it.
Is that what you're suggesting?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Mr. Eyolfson, for your patience.
Now we're going to Mr. Strauss.
Go ahead, Mr. Strauss.
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
That was great work, Chair. I personally thank you for that intervention.
Mr. Green, Telus designed the program for $100 million. I don't know if that was an appropriate amount or not. I'll reserve judgment on that, but $150 million stayed with Canada Health Infoway. I would think that, if I were dealing with Telus, I'd say, “I need you to design the system. It needs to be interoperable with the major EMRs in Canada. It needs to be interoperable with most of the pharmacies in Canada. It needs to be private. It needs to be secure. Go do it for $100 million.”
What happened with the other $150 million? Did it take you $150 million to decide that's what you needed to ask Telus to do?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
Telus's role was to operate the hub that transmits the prescriptions from the doctor's or prescriber's office—
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
—to the pharmacy. They were not responsible for integrating it into the different EMR systems used by prescribers.
Also, within the pharmacy industry, there are three or four different pharmacy systems available. Now, in order to integrate the Telus hub and the PrescribeIT program into all those systems, work was required to be done by each one of those vendors. Infoway helped support the vendors to do the work so that they could make their systems compliant with PrescribeIT.