Thank you, Madam Chair. I believe that the funding that’s new O and M money in this year’s budget is in fact under hospitals. So we’re not actually on that page yet.

I can talk a little bit about the rollout plan. As the Member indicated, the EMR is being used now in Yellowknife and Hay River. Both Yellowknife Health and Social Services and the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority had chosen the same EMR program, which sets the stage for them to start moving towards greater compatibility.

Work that’s been done to date over the last year, we do have an EMR committee that is co-sponsored by Dr. Ewan Affleck, who you’ve probably all seen on national ads as an EMR champion, identified by the Canadian Medical Association. He co-chairs this initiative with the department. As was noted, we have received a fair amount of support from GNWT capital funding as well as Canada Health Infoway. That funding will support planning, development, purchasing of software, customizing of software and the rollout, but it does not support the ongoing O and M costs. We do have in the budget new funding of $489,000. That’s proposed to support four positions, which

would start to address the need for the ongoing O and M.

In terms of rollout, the first step, and we’re doing this right now, we have chosen a vendor. We have a short-term contract with the vendor, the vendor is for the same EMR program that’s currently in use in Yellowknife and Hay River and as part of that short-term contract we are doing proof of concept, doing some adaptation, because right now the two authorities use the program differently in order to realize the benefits to all our residents, to realize the benefits for chronic disease management, we really need to have consistent use across the Territories. So the first focus is on working with Yellowknife and Hay River authorities and then the rollout to the other authorities is going to take place in a phased approach. There’s a number of building blocks we need to put in place. Right now we only have two of our authorities that take advantage of these services of the TSC within the GNWT. That’s the Deh Cho and Sahtu. In order for us to effectively use the EMR, we really need our authorities all to be on the same platforms, to be using the same software. So our first step is to work with all our authorities to bring them on to the TSC.

Then there’s an issue of capacity. Some authorities are more eager or more ready to get started than others. Right now part of the work that we’re doing at our steering committee is planning the rollout, identifying who wants to be first, who wants to be second, who do we migrate to TSC. We’re getting, actually, great support from the Department of Public Works and Services right now in looking at what’s involved in migrating our authorities to the TSC. So it’s a fairly comprehensive undertaking and we would expect the rollout to take as much as four years, depending on how quickly we can put all these pieces in place. Thank you.