Currently, the health network is inefficient and navigates on sight because of the difficulty of sharing the medical data of Quebecers, estimates the Commissioner for Health and Well-being, Joanne Castonguay.
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Mme Castonguay was one of the first speakers on Tuesday in the study of Bill 3 on the decompartmentalization of medical data.
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Joanne Castonguay, Health and Welfare Commissioner
Such a reform is necessary, she judges. “We have been increasing health care spending for years, but we are not going to get the benefits we expect to receive. Then the fact of not being able to understand the situation, we work on intuition, everyone works on intuition. It’s horrible, “commented in the press scrum the one responsible for evaluating the efficiency of the health system.
Because of this inefficiency, Quebec invests more and more in this ministry, which monopolizes more than 40% of the state budget. “Over the past 25 years, the government share allocated to health has increased. Still. This means that we put less in Transport, less in Justice, less in Environment, less in Education, in terms of proportion,” underlines Joanne Castonguay.
Bill 3 defended by the Minister of Cybersecurity and Digital, Éric Caire, will ensure that the medical data of Quebecers will belong to the government, rather than to each of the establishments individually. Quebec hopes to allow sharing between professionals, so that a doctor, for example, can consult the course of a patient in other establishments.
To handle better
But the reform will also allow Quebec to have a better vision of the needs of the health network, in order to better plan its resources and evaluate the effectiveness of its policies, argues Ms.me Castonguay.
It gives the evolution of needs to respond to the aging of the population. “If we had had better tools, or even if the government had paid more attention to governance, it would have looked much more closely at the impacts of the aging of the population and would have put in place the tools to be able to deal with it, including in the CHSLD, in home care, etc.,” said the commissioner.
“It is this role of governance that he [le gouvernement] don’t play enough and one of the reasons is [le manque d’] access to information,” she adds.
In parliamentary committee, the PLQ and QS said they agreed with the principle of the bill.
Solidarity MP Vincent Marissal however reiterated his fears that pharmaceutical companies would take advantage of the other part of the reform, which will allow data to be shared for scientific research purposes.
Mr. Marissal is also worried regarding a possible data leak, as happened at Desjardins.
But one speaker noted that the benefits outweigh the risks. After all, despite the flight, the population has not stopped using the cooperative’s services.
