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.
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
It helped the vendors. You paid the vendors to make their systems interoperable with the system that you paid Telus to make.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
It's a slightly separate issue. The money paid to Telus was to build and operate the system over the period of the contract time, so that was over the eight years we've been running the program. Then for each individual EMR system that had to integrate, there would have to be new software. We had a process in which we would procure or negotiate contracts with the vendors to integrate the technology, which is quite common with health IT programs.
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Can you ballpark what proportion of the $150 million was paid to Canada Health Infoway personnel to do the work and what proportion ended up being paid to the vendors and the pharmacies?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
We have those figures available, and we did comprehensive reporting on all of those aspects. I don't have that information today off the top of my head, but we have all the financial statements that were presented to the board on a regular basis, and we can certainly provide that information for you.
Conservative
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Two hundred and fifty million dollars was spent. By my lights, the taxpayer has nothing now. The physicians and the family doctors I've talked to who were using the system do not know what they're going to be using six weeks from now. I haven't heard any clear answer that way.
Two hundred and fifty million dollars of taxpayer money is gone. Have any board members resigned over this debacle?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
The $250 million have been invested. We're basically looking at the program going forward. We built a lot of infrastructure using the program, which will be invested going forward. It's not a one-off investment. It will contribute to the assets we built.
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
What are you going to do with the assets? You have the assets. What are you doing with them next week?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
They'll be used to build the open standards approach. We're going to launch the open standard in May. It's already being designed. We have intellectual property of the PrescribeIT software itself, which complements—
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Are you going to make this intellectual property public?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
We will make the intellectual property available to the provinces and territories. We will provide assistance and support to jurisdictions to implement the open standard.
Conservative
Matt Strauss Conservative Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON
Can you table the minutes of the last board of directors meeting with us?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
If the committee requests, we can—
Liberal
Liberal
Maggie Chi Liberal Don Valley North, ON
Thank you to the witness for appearing.
Is this national standard called the e-standard?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
It's the open standard.
Liberal
Maggie Chi Liberal Don Valley North, ON
When was this first developed, and what is the timeline for delivering this open standard?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
We've been working on the standard for at least a year. The timeline for release is early May.
Liberal
Maggie Chi Liberal Don Valley North, ON
How is it going to trickle down to the pharmacies and physicians? If we had time to socialize PrescribeIT, what confidence do we have in making sure this is going to work?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Health Infoway
Canada Health Infoway manages a lot of digital health standards. It's one of the things we do. We have a process for launching the standards and disseminating the information. We would organize workshops with industry and other partners, users, providers, and the provincial and territorial partners, to educate them and to provide support for implementing the new standard.
Liberal
Maggie Chi Liberal Don Valley North, ON
Thank you, Mr. Green.
I think my colleague touched briefly on the phasing out of PrescribeIT and the data that was collected throughout the implementation of the program. When you implement the national standard, are you incorporating that data as well? How do we make sure the lessons learned and the knowledge collected are not lost in the process?
