Health committee  Two researchers in Canada are looking at the use of incentives for physician-based productivity, and I can certainly refer you later and send in those studies.

Health committee  I'll try to hit off the questions. I'm not an expert in primary care evaluation of interventions, especially on the service delivery side. I do know there are networks of primary care researchers across Canada. In British Columbia, Alberta, and the Maritimes, primary care researc

Health committee  I'd be happy to start off with that. I think there is evidence that fee-for-service works for getting more. Paying on a piecework, patchwork basis provides an incentive to work more, to see more patients. For those doctors who have an above-average case mix or acuity in their p

Health committee  I'll condition my statements on not being an expert in health human resources, but I know that there are opportunities to change the mix of trained professionals providing health care. However, at the same time, a lot of the costs being driven by the aging baby boomers, for examp

Health committee  I believe there is some emerging evidence coming out of Ontario, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, regarding their family health teams in Ontario. I'm not familiar with the evaluations and the results but I believe they are currently starting to emerge. I know that

Health committee  Yes, and I think there's definitely a role for—and I would lobby for—a national role that is able to quickly identify new and innovative cost-saving, high-quality, effective care and disseminate that quickly and assist the provinces in scaling that up quickly as well. A lot of

Health committee  I think it was quite strategic in how they picked their procedures because they elected to choose preference- and supply-sensitive conditions and probably in surgical specialties where they had the least resistance or surgical groups who were trying to advocate for additional fun

Health committee  Yes. From my own point of view, I think it's a really thorny issue, because as you add different types of providers to the community care sector, they will provide good quality care for people who need it. As you described, we are biased to providing the most expensive type of ca

Health committee  It will be just adding more expenditures to more expenditures.

Health committee  Well, I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

Health committee  I think some of these innovations that we talked about—for example, bundled payments, whereby you can be innovative in the sphere of care providers and provide different types of skilled care in that bundle of care, but at the same time in combination with policies that are reduc

Health committee  Those are four excellent questions. It sounds like a final exam I'd give to my graduate students.

Health committee  Fair enough. Certainly, the costs of ALC are not well recognized. A lot of the costs are essentially the suffering of patients who are not able to access the beds that are occupied. Just for clarification, ALC patients are hospital patients who are ready to be discharged but c

Health committee  Essentially a bundled payment is a fixed amount for taking on all aspects of financial and clinical risk for a patient for a given period of time. For example, if you are hospitalized for a knee replacement, you're essentially given a sum, just as the federal wait times did for a

Health committee  To my mind it's a new way of doing business, but I think that sort of a spur to provide this sometimes expensive data is critically important to move us to the next level. For example, if we required patient-reported outcomes data, these could ostensibly be appended to routine