Health committee  It's such a huge topic and my experience is longer than a one-minute or two-minute question. What I would say is that to take an idea from the bench to the marketplace, to a drug with a label on the counter at your pharmacy, costs $1 billion today; it costs between $750 million

Health committee  I don't think we're behind, but I think we could be leading. We have some of the best doctors and some of the best scientists in the world in our country. That's one thing where I think we could, as a committee of innovators, be leading.

Health committee  I'll take it to a micro level, and that is because I've just finished being the president of medical staff at my hospital. As such, I sat on the board of the hospital, and I also sat on the medical advisory committee, where we have to look at all the research proposals that come

Health committee  Very briefly, we need more bodies. It's interesting that in the public eye, the physician shortage is all about the family doctor shortage, because of the problems we've talked about, but we have a shortage of doctors in specialties as well, or maybe we don't have a shortage of t

Health committee  Very briefly, the forces remunerate our Canadian Forces physician assistants. It's a model that has slowly started to percolate into the civilian sector. Manitoba, in rural medicine, is using physician assistants. In Ontario, they're getting contracts through separate contracts w

Health committee  In terms of remote access and that kind of transfer of information, I can say that we, as preceptors for these physician assistants and for some of the physicians in the military, are often asked via e-mail, months or years after, questions about patient care and that sort of thi

Health committee  The learning goes two ways. I had one of our elite soldiers who's also a medic come and work with me on a Saturday. I don't normally oblige them to come in on a Saturday, so I thought I'd give him a cup of coffee and teach him something. I gave him the scenario that an IED had

Health committee  I would just say, on the doctor shortage front, that our community grew at a terrible time. We grew at a time when we had cut the number of medical school slots in our province. We were just starting to see the effects of those cuts when we actually started to have our massive gr

Health committee  First of all, can you thank your son for his service to our country? I try to do that every time I meet a new military person I work with.

Health committee  It's a complicated question because it is the patient's information. First of all, this is a dream, the memory stick; this is not a reality yet. And it's a dream that we can collectively, hopefully, have together this afternoon. There needs to be a comprehensive medical record o

Health committee  I think I can answer that.

Health committee  Ours is the largest family health team in the province of Ontario. As such, the family health team went out and kind of led the charge on electronic medical records in our community. They looked at all the vendors and all the products, and they chose one through a very aggressive

Health committee  At the moment, through a program run by the provincial government, through an organization called OntarioMD, there are subsidies and there are some incentives for us to be early adopters. That's one of the reasons I became an early adopter. We are a progressive practice. We're a

Health committee  I certainly can, and I should preface this by saying I'm married to a civil litigation lawyer. Confidentiality has been an obsession of mine since the day I met her, and actually since the day I walked into first-year medicine. To give you an example, I was quite concerned about

Health committee  Whenever I answer a question about prevention in my specialty, I always caution everyone to take this message away from a meeting like this. Tell everybody you meet not to put Q-tips in their ears. Prevention is a very big thing in our area, with regard to injury to the ears. In