Just by way of correction, we have not actually spent $10 million to date. In fact, we just signed the agreement with Canada Health Infoway for the $4.1 million. We may not spend all
of that $4.1 million. The way Infoway works is we are reimbursed as we roll the program out to a certain number of providers. So that’s a maximum amount of money that we could spend. In terms of ongoing O and M costs, we have been told by our technical experts that to fully operate this system throughout the Territories on an ongoing basis could take up to as many as 10 or 12 positions, and these positions, they’re doing security, they’re doing data integrity, they’re training, they’re upgrading the system, they’re testing new applications, they’re supporting practitioners.
It’s difficult to give an accurate sense of the ongoing incremental cost because we know that some of these functions are going on today in our authorities. So there may be some net savings. We also are working towards the concept of a back office where, very much, we are looking at authorities sharing resources, not necessarily centralizing positions, but sharing expertise so that we don’t have to duplicate the same functions eight times. We really hope that by taking a virtual back-office approach to operating the EMR, we will be able to achieve some savings. It would, however, probably be safe to estimate that you’re looking at somewhere in the range of $800,000 a year to a million a year to the full care and feeding of the EMR on an ongoing basis. Thank you.