Government Operations committee  Thank you. Good morning. On behalf of the Canadian Institute for Health Information, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee. For the last 20 years, CIHI, as we're known, has played a unique role in Canada's health sector. As a government-fund

Government Operations committee  Our data is not on the open data portal.

Government Operations committee  I don't think the question is applicable to us.

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.

Government Operations committee  We're pleased and interested in cooperating in the portal. It's just that, to date, the way we worked with our jurisdictional partners, we haven't begun to do that yet.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely, and not unlike Statistics Canada, I think there's an opportunity to have some sort of a redirect towards the data that's on our website from the portal. I think that would be a good way to perhaps do this efficiently.

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  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,

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 Instit

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 alongs

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

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

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  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 expendi