Sure.
As a strategic investor, Infoway has developed, in consultation with our jurisdictional partners, the key requirements, the core components, and a blueprint to guide the pan-Canadian developments of EHR. Infoway's strategic plan identifies those priorities, along with measurable goals and targets, and provides an agreed-upon road map for the development of the various components of the EHR that we fund.
Madam Fraser's overview report specifically states that “at the federal level the audit reported that Infoway was exercising due regard in managing funds from the federal government to achieve its goal related to the implementation of EHRs”. As a result, today every province and territory and the populations they serve are benefiting from a share of the federal government's investments through Infoway in the new information systems that will help transform health care.
Let me share with you just two examples. Our investments have helped to eliminate three-quarters of X-ray films and replace them with digitized images. Today some 40% of our radiologists report they are providing services to new and remote sites—that's incredibly important, given the large land mass of our country—and eliminating between 10,000 and 17,000 patient transfers per year.
Leveraging Infoway's investments, drug information systems are now in place in British Columbia, in Alberta, in P.E.I., and in Saskatchewan. Take the system in B.C., PharmaNet, which captures every prescription dispensed in pharmacies and provides alerts to pharmacists and physicians. In 2008, more than 55 million prescriptions were processed by PharmaNet, and 2.5 million significant drug interactions were identified. When you project that across Canada, this suggests that drug information systems could significantly reduce inappropriate prescriptions and identify more than 20 million significant drug interactions every single year.
The Auditor General made eight recommendations to Infoway in her November 2009 report to Parliament. Shortly after the report was tabled, Infoway sent its action plan to this committee as well as to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health. Our response to the eight recommendations encompassed some 40 separate actions, which were implemented by our self-imposed deadline of March 31, 2010, the end of our fiscal year. We also reviewed this action plan with the Office of the Auditor General of Canada.
Of the eight recommendations, five call for improving and enhancing our existing reporting, especially as we report to Canadians. In this regard, we conducted focus groups with the public across the country to ensure that our enhancements in reporting on availability, on adoption, on standards, our investment targets, and reporting variances in our business plan would be understood by those Canadians. The result of these focus group discussions helped us to improve and expand reporting on the key measures that have been integrated into our 2009-10 annual report, which will be published in a few weeks.
We have also assessed and strengthened our management controls over contracting for goods and services to reduce the risk of contract disputes, with the introduction of additional control points, advance notice of expiry dates to contract administrators, enhanced management signature procedures and processes, as well as required workflow modifications. We have supplemented these administrative changes with an internal communications and education program for our staff.
As recommended by the OAG, we have reviewed and modified our procurement policy with respect to contract amendments and extensions and have had the revised policy approved by our board of directors, and now it's firmly in place.
In response to the recommendation that Infoway should better document its analysis of project deliverables to support our decision to release funds, we have revamped our project portfolio management system and have modified and updated the processes and procedures to support the release of funds for deliverables in a consistent manner. All appropriate staff have been trained on the new system requirements.
We have also incorporated into our investment approval process for the core systems of the EHR the requirement to obtain results of conformance testing on the core EHR systems that we fund.
We believe that we have responded to the recommendations in a timely, efficient, and effective manner and have addressed the issues of concern raised in the OAG's audit report.
Mr. Chairman, that concludes my remarks. I'll be delighted to take questions.