I think, first of all, it would be fair to say that I don’t believe that the Health Net that we have so far begun to roll out is used to its maximum. The potential for its use is only just being recognized by our providers and collectively at the CEO table. The providers, in particular some of our physicians, nurse practitioners and community nurses, are very keen on being able to explore this. So the general thing that you see with most telehealth rollouts across Canada are telespeech, some tele-psychiatry where it is done on a consult basis of a case, child welfare case management. Those are the types of things early.
Where you start to move is when you start to do actual treatment. So group therapy, individual therapy, we are starting to explore that in a few areas.
Uses are just beginning. What we do is actually look at uptake. It is quite a drilling down and it is technical spot checks to see. Trying to get the information to be able to make it translated beyond the technology is a bit of a stretch. I think that is fair
to say that we are moving it out as quickly as we can and we are moving to change management, but we think we have only just begun to see how much more we can use this equipment.
My recent discussions with emergency physicians at Stanton, we think that actually the on-call physician and start to do consults to some of our community nurses. This was an application not envisioned when we started to roll this out and how the on-call physician system can be linked.
I think it is better to say this will become more and more a critical component of our future delivery, so I am not answering the Member’s questions as far as how many hours so far because we haven’t even begun to envision how many hours we actually could start to use this as we get our culture and our providers trained up and understanding the potential.
Where we have locum physicians coming from other jurisdictions that have full eHealth systems, they are very excited and they are actually helping us introduce the other applications that we can use this for. A big one in Hay River where the Minister was there to announce eHealth was right there and then we had the first time where the labs and the X-rays were read with the specialist on one end in Stanton and the consult happening through Edmonton and right back to Hay River. The patient got good, immediate, in time, quality care without any transport. Thank you.