Industry committee  A couple of committee members asked about work product, and I want to just be clear that what we're talking about is de-identified data. It does not have any direct patient information on it, and the research that is done goes through ethics approval, very structured research. It

Industry committee  In the provinces that have a province-wide drug information system, it's a government system, so they are auditing that. They can identify the people who are accessing when they shouldn't be. That's not unique to pharmacy, either.

Industry committee  It's all part of post-marketing surveillance to look at a lot of safety information. Before drugs come on the market, they're tested in a fairly narrow, often homogeneous group. When they come out on the market and you're using them in pediatrics or the elderly or people with kid

Industry committee  In terms of the clinical outcomes for that particular individual?

Industry committee  You start to get more of that with better integration of adverse drug reaction reporting and clinical outcomes. British Columbia has a pretty impressive integrated.... They can look at cardiac outcomes based on utilization of cardiac medicines, that type of thing. These are all v

Industry committee  That's right. When you look at clinical research, it's the number who have been treated and what their outcomes are compared to a control group that's not on medications or on a different medication, that type of thing.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  I'm not aware of that information being disclosed. I think there have been some extremely isolated incidents—you know, a member of the pharmacy staff might have looked up a patient record—but there are really good processes in place to identify that. In provinces like British Col

Industry committee  Yes. Certainly as a professional association representing pharmacists, we find some of this discussion is outside of our mandate and my particular expertise, unlike Dr. Levin's. But I share those concerns, even more just as a Canadian, that we're signing off on a lot of stuff wh

Industry committee  It is a concern. We have a position that we support the collection of prescribing information but it should be de-identified of the prescriber as well as obviously the patient. We hear some of those stories as well where it seems they get down to such a narrow postal code and th

Industry committee  Yes, I would. I think this bill will enable them to access information, and in particular, sometimes you want information that's across the jurisdictions, between the different provinces. Right now many of them are very restricted to only what's happening within their province. I

Industry committee  We've been very involved in the whole Internet pharmacy issue for probably at least 15 years because of a lot of concerns. A lot of Internet pharmacies look like legitimate Canadian pharmacies and they're not. They're offshore somewhere and there's no guarantee that the drug you'

Industry committee  Back when PIPEDA was being introduced, there was a lot of concern of how that might impede the day-to-day ability of health care practitioners to work together and care for their patients. A lot was done. There was the whole PARTs tool kit. At the end of it, PIPEDA has not been a

Industry committee  We are not as an association but you have a lot of universities, agencies, that are looking at appropriate medication use and safety. So to get that data in on prescribing patterns and utilization is really important. We're spending over $30 billion and almost half of that is pai

Industry committee  Thank you. Good morning. My name is Janet Cooper. I am a pharmacist and I am vice-president of professional affairs with the Canadian Pharmacists Association. I am pleased to be here today to discuss Bill S-4, an act to amend PIPEDA. CPhA, the Canadian Pharmacists Association,