Health committee  Sure. In the senior population you do see more of the accidental and unintended opioid poisonings. In younger people, they're more intentional.

Health committee  I'm actually not here with a planned presentation. I'm here supporting Hilary and to answer any questions you have about some of the data we have available to look at this issue.

Health committee  Yes, it is employers' insurance, provided through employers. That's the majority of it.

Health committee  No, that's not something that we have looked at. Offhand, I couldn't provide you with an answer to that.

Health committee  It's a question with many answers, I think. The costs of improving the data relative to the costs of the program are quite small. In fact, our entire organization runs for $100 million. We're covering health data across all of the different domains of health care, health expenditure, health workforce, etc.

Health committee  It depends on the question you're trying to answer, the extent to which how well it can be done. I certainly think there are opportunities to model and explore the implications of different options. The information base we have today, particularly for certain provinces, is pretty strong as well.

Health committee  What I think is, there are a lot of opportunities to model different policy options and also the implications of those going forward, and a strengthened information base will help with that.

Health committee  We haven't done that type of analysis ourselves. We have seen studies that would suggest that there would potentially be an economic impact, perhaps upwards of $4 billion a year, but those aren't studies that we've done ourselves. One of the things that I would emphasize to the committee is that, if we have the correct data, we can model a lot of this ahead of time.

Health committee  As I mentioned in my remarks, drug use in hospitals represents an information gap for us right now, just like with cancer drugs. An important piece of the evidence in answering questions such as those you've raised would be to have the ability to analyze hospital drug data alongside data from public programs outside of hospitals.

Health committee  We spend $29 billion on drugs in the country.

Health committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My name's Brent Diverty. I'm vice-president, programs, and I'm joined by my colleague Michael Gaucher, who's our director of pharmaceuticals and health workforce. I'm very pleased to address the committee today. On behalf of the Canadian Institute for Health Information, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee.

Government Operations committee  Just very briefly, like Statistics Canada, it's part of our mandate to make sure our data is accessible. In fact our success is largely based on the extent to which we make data available to the range of users. Obviously, there's always more needs to satisfy than you can satisfy, and you have to make choices around that.

Government Operations committee  I think the answer is yes. We are open to it.

Government Operations committee  I'd be happy to explore further what the best means of participating in the portal would be. We are open to participating in the portal.

Government Operations committee  The data we hold is provincial and territorial data that comes to us, so we're the custodian of the data. Historically, we've not participated in the open data portal because we're not a federal government department or agency.