Infoway Budget Announcement Speech for The Hon. Leona Aglukkaq

Speech for The Hon. Leona Aglukkaq

Minister of Health

Feb. 11, 2009

Queensway Carleton Hospital, Ottawa

Check Against Delivery

Good Afternoon,

It's a pleasure to be here to tell you about how one of the commitments in Budget 2009 will help significantly modernize health care across the country.

The Government of Canada is investing in Infoway, a non-profit corporation, to help create an electronic databank of health records for all Canadians.

The long term goal is to have everyone's medical information available through a network that links hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices and pharmacies across the country.  

Infoway is working with provinces and territorial health systems to create this network.  It will bring together the many pieces of information on our medical tests and treatments, so that health care professionals across the country have important information readily available no matter where we seek care.

Creating this network for more than 33 million people is a daunting task.  But it is something we must do for the benefit of Canadians.

The Government of Canada has already invested $1.6 billion dollars in building such a system. It's one that needs specialized hardware and software so that the various electronic systems already in place across the country can be linked to one another.

We have to link those systems in a way that is similar to the way banks are linked to one another through a system of automated bank machines. You can make secure transactions instantly from anywhere in the country. What we are building is a bank of medical information that is accessible by health professionals across this country.

Any doctor will tell you that the more they know about the medical history of a patient, the more quickly and accurately they can make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment.

The problem is that so much of the information that health care providers need to treat us is often stored in the filing cabinets of several different offices.

If you move to British Columbia from Newfoundland, and your medical records are in a filing cabinet in St. John's, there is no fast or easy way to get them to Vancouver.  And in a medical emergency they are out of sight and out of reach.

Put yourselves in the shoes of an emergency room physician who is presented with an unconscious patient.  It is critical that they know of any pre-existing medical conditions in order to know what type of care to provide.  An electronic health record would provide these answers in precious seconds and could contribute to saving lives.
 
With secure electronic health records, hospitals are able to log on and find out everything they need to know about a patient in seconds. They don't have to rely on memory or ability to communicate; they will have critical information at their fingertips.

An electronic health record will also mean that prescription information, medical history and drug allergies can all be a few key-strokes away. Diagnostic images can be digitized and become a part of a health file.

What that means is that in many cases, x-rays and MRIs won't have to be duplicated when we go to a different institution. If we are referred from a General Practitioner to a Specialist, the original x-ray will be sent forward and won't have to be repeated.

Some of the money invested through Infoway is already paying dividends. In Nova Scotia, every hospital is linked through a fibre-optic network. No matter where you are in the province, digital images of tests can be transmitted from one facility to another. In case of a difficult diagnosis, specialists across the province can be looking at the same image and talking to one another as they try to solve a medical problem.

In the Yukon, the Telehealth Network is available in every community. What that means is that a patient can be connected to a specialist for follow-ups without having to travel vast distances like they had to in the past. That means less time and money wasted on travel for both patients and doctors.

When a digital medical imaging system becomes the standard across the country, our health system can expect to save up to $1 billion a year through reductions in the number of tests and the improvements in productivity that come with it.
 
Our medical system has to move into the information age in the same way that all other sectors of our society have. We have a faster more accurate way of communicating medical information and there is no reason not to embrace it.

In doing so we will become a world leader.

Building this system is labour-intensive and will give some economic stimulus to the economy. When combined with funding from the provinces, this project has the potential to create more than 15,000 jobs before it's finished.

Ultimately though, our single purpose is to improve health care.

Better information will lead to better care. It will reduce duplications while improving the management of chronic ailments. It will reduce wait times by speeding up the flow of information. It will reduce the number of adverse reactions to drugs that patients suffer while in hospital. Those adverse reactions prolong a patient's stay in hospital and tie up hospital beds unnecessarily.

That's why in Budget 2009 we have committed an additional $500 million toward getting Canadians plugged in to this national network.  It is an ambitious project but one that could save the health care system billions of dollars every year.

The funding will also be used to speed up the implementation of electronic medical records, so that family doctors are able to connect to this electronic system.  And it will extend and integrate the network to include pharmacies and community care facilities.

Partnering with provincial and territorial governments, Infoway has already made great progress in developing the network but it needs this new financial support to meet these ambitious and important goals.

Electronic records will contribute to making our health care system more effective and efficient.  They will contribute to maintaining the status of our health care system as one of the best in the world.

Thank You.