Thank you for that insightful question. When I think about the job at hand, what information technology is going to be doing, it's really going to be transforming the health care system. It's going to be getting clinicians to work in completely different ways.
The challenge for us here is not a technological challenge, by the way; it's a people challenge. It's a chain management challenge of getting, in many cases, these clinicians who are not salaried, who are not employees of any facilities, but entrepreneurs and small business people, to adopt these new technologies. We've known from the start that the chain management and getting used to these systems is going to be the biggest challenge.
That is why we put in place a protection of the federal funds. We're a strategic investor, and the way we fund is once we get a signed agreement of what needs to take place, we provide 20% to get on with the job; we provide another 30% when the hardware and software are in, but we hold back 50% of the funds until we get take-up, until we get usage from the clinicians. From where I sit, we can put into place peer-to-peer groups, tools, and best practices of how clinicians should adopt this, but I can't make them adopt it. It has to be up to the territories and provinces to do that. That's why we hold back the money.
Will this happen? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that this will happen, that clinicians will change the way they are working. Is it slow? Yes, it is slow because there's a lot of learning to do, especially with clinicians who have been out of the system, have been out of school for the last 20 or 30 years. They are now finding new tools and how to use them. Clinicians who are in the system today will not come out and practise in Canada without these state-of-the-art systems.