Health committee  Very briefly, and that is, define a question and look for an outcome. For example, with a chronic kidney disease, what is the problem? It's too many individuals moving down the slope towards dialysis. How can we address that? That has to be your outcome, so what are the innovatio

Health committee  Doctors tend to be conservative. We're generally not early adopters. For instance, it gets us into trouble if we try drugs too early. It has to be tried and true. As we move into the next generation, there is increasing comfort with using advanced technologies.

Health committee  It's fair to say there are a number of leaders. I'm going to come back to the car analogy in that it will work out that there are going to be major leaders over the course of time. But there's always going to be the need for boutique solutions. Perhaps the ideal is that the bou

Health committee  My really short answer is when you're funding a solution you require that it does roll up, that it speaks broadly, and that it can export its data. That is the fundamental challenge for everybody, and if we can accomplish that, it makes a huge difference.

Health committee  I completely agree. It really has to do with the doctor-patient relationship. I'm sorry to move into English. The important concept has to be that we need to make sure that the doctors are trained to have that relationship. It may be so they get to the point where it's a cardi

Health committee  In certain instances it is not searchable; in others, it is. I will speak just to OSCAR, which I know well. In our particular EMR it has already been adopted by at least three or four public health agencies in the cities in Ontario. All of that is very searchable. We can actuall

Health committee  You can look at dentistry, for example. We all receive reminders from our dentists. If we can start to do that electronically, that's going to make a big difference. I'm not of the opinion that we should be incentivizing physicians to do things. It should be a part of their day-t

Health committee  I think if you get too prescriptive it doesn't work. The concept has to be that my data must speak to your clinic's data, and therefore it's up to the companies, to the innovators, to make sure that innovation happens. When I talk to my technical people, they tell me that it's

Health committee  Perhaps I'll just reply that the countries in the United Kingdom spring to mind, where they've tried to have a one-size-fits-all approach. It has failed dramatically, and that has been a real challenge. For Australia, it's the same thing. It has essentially allowed the marketplac

Health committee  Fundamentally, I would agree that you can't have the wild west in deploying electronic technologies. You have to be comfortable that when my mother's chart is there and a drug is being prescribed, the particular system her doctor is using will recognize drug-to-drug interactions.

Health committee  The way I look at it is that if we refer a patient from one person to another and the patient says, “Yes, I will go to see that specialist”, that is implied consent. For that specialist to do the job properly, they need me to send the information to the patient. The second thing

Health committee  I would absolutely agree with Dr. Lear that around the self-management issue, part of our challenge in training now is training our physicians to understand that the patient is probably going to come in with.... There are two types of patients. They come in with way more informat

Health committee  When I was talking about standards, I would agree that it's about outcomes and innovations, but you need to ensure that whatever it's doing, it is secure, it's something that does meet privacy regulations, that the data is organized in a standard way. One of the challenges we hav

Health committee  Absolutely. So you have to ensure that the integrity of the privacy is maintained so that patient privacy is always maintained.

Health committee  On the telemedicine, Canada is a huge country geographically and when you're working up in a small rural community one of the things that is very frustrating often or very nerve-racking for the family doctor is that you don't have instant access or soon access to a specialist. Te