Public Accounts committee  Yes, but there are other provinces—Ontario being one, for example, as well as British Columbia and Quebec—that have databases for the senior population because that's what the government basically funds. They can search those databases and give you that same sort of answer.

Public Accounts committee  The four we talked about could, and there are about six provinces that track all drugs for all people. They could do that, but the challenge here.... The question you asked is a good one. It could be done on a retrospective basis. The kinds of systems that we have specified and g

Public Accounts committee  The answer to your question is one that we're basically working on right now, and we're working on it together with the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which does this type of work. The issue for us is privacy and the security of the records. Clearly, if we have these

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's exactly the kind of system that's being looked at currently. At the same time, we have also done focus groups and talked to Canadians about whether we can look at their records in an unidentified way, where the numbers are scrambled, etc. Basically, there was a high r

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Your earlier question was whether I could look at the strategic plan and whether it is there. If you look at my strategies, absolutely, it is there, and those strategies were just approved last week by my board. In terms of how doctors go about the conversion, I talked earlier

Public Accounts committee  I'll give you the figures, but if you don't mind I'll just do a little preamble to that first. We are, as far as I know, the only country that systematically looked at what the benefits could be as we got into this. We talk today about the cost of $10 billion; the same studies

Public Accounts committee  I can give you the number. The number in the study that we did on diagnostic imaging is $1 billion annually, and we're just about to publish a number on drug information systems in the four provinces I mentioned, and that is in that region as well.

Public Accounts committee  As I said, one of our core businesses is standards development, standards implementation. If you're putting in a new system and you're getting any of our money, you have to put in the standards. It's as simple as that. For the standards, there are slight variations from province

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for your question. One of the major challenges of this job, by the way, is the number of stakeholders that we have to interact with, that we have to, if you like, jolly along and incent. Clearly, we're not only talking about clinicians here. We're talking about ministr

Public Accounts committee  We have the world's only standards collaborative. When we talk about the building of standards, into that group we bring in the private sector, we bring in clinicians, nurses, pharmacists, and we bring in governments, and they basically work on what the standard should be. Again

Public Accounts committee  The actions that we are taking, again, thanks to the new money from the federal government, will be actions to accelerate the adoption of automation at community settings in primary care, so both with physicians and with nurse practitioners. Right now about six provinces have al

Public Accounts committee  I wouldn't go as far as saying a strategic plan.... We basically fund project by project. Each of the projects is subject to a contractual arrangement, and the contractual arrangement is worked on a statement of work. A statement of work basically has the milestones and the check

Public Accounts committee  Sir, I don't think it's a period of hit and miss. I think it's a transformable period of basically change management. When you look at western countries across the world, Canada is somewhere dead last in terms of community physicians and automation, because there hasn't been this

Public Accounts committee  Sure, and thank you for that question. Basically, we put in place a safeguard mechanism: if there is no take-up or the take-up from clinicians is taking a while, then we hold back that money until they meet that goal. So we have a gated funding approach. If provinces delay thei