DHiC 17 – Unleashing Collective Impact for Health Data Transformation

This transcript was produced by AI and may contain minor errors.

 

Claire Snyman: This is a patient safety issue. Full stop.

Katie Bryski: Hello and welcome to Digital Health in Canada, the Digital Health Canada podcast. I’m Katie Bryski.

Shelagh Maloney: And I’m Shelagh Maloney.

Katie Bryski: And as we celebrate Digital Health Canada’s 50th anniversary, we have 50 reasons for you to listen to the podcast. Reason number 31, we are connecting with real change makers. For real collaboration and real change.

Scroll LinkedIn. Watch a webinar or attend a conference, and you’ll hear many ideas for how we can improve Canada’s health data landscape. But how do we move from conversation to change? Today we’re joined by two health leaders who are demonstrating that collaboration is the key to bridging ideas, strategy, and action.

And it is our great pleasure to welcome Dr. Ewan Affleck, chair of Networked Health Alberta, and Claire Snyman, chair of Networked Health BC. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Thank you. Thank you.

Shelagh Maloney: So let’s start. If you’ve are longtime listeners to this podcast, you know that the first thing that we wanna do is get to know a little bit about our leaders and specifically their journeys.

So, Claire, why don’t we start with you?

Claire Snyman: Thank you, and thank you so much for having me on this today. So, as you can hear, I am, I’m not Canadian, so I’ve had a bit of a convoluted, uh, career. I began my career as a clinical dietician actually in South Africa. I worked in pediatric surgery and neonatal ICU. I moved into pharma and biotech with a BComm in marketing.

We then moved to Australia and I worked there in that sector. And then we moved to Vancouver and I really focused in on product and marketing management in the sector. But for me it was 2010. As a patient, I was diagnosed with a non-malignant brain tumor and I had, I had no guidance, so I started actually tracking my own health data in this red binder.

And boy, I wish I could show it to you now, but I now have a really extensive collection of binders really due to that pauce of information sharing between providers. And that gap for me contributed towards medical negligence when my tumor doubled in size too later on, and I needed emergency brain surgery.

And so fast forward to, I suppose, where we are today. I live with chronic conditions. I have a brain injury as well, and I’ve shifted to, I work as a patient experience consultant and an engagement consultant, so I combine my previous career and my professional background with my lived experience and on the patient side accessing my health records, what I call my patient story.

Remains challenge. And that’s why I’m super committed advocate to really looking at how can we advocate for patient access to our health data. And so two years ago I joined Networked Health BC, which is really a group that’s focused on sort of that principle based, person centered approach to the use of health data in BC, which is so, so meaningful to me.

And so I’ve had a sort of convoluted career path, but that’s where I am today.

Katie Bryski: I would say that the majority of the career paths we’ve learned about on the podcast have been circuitous and really pulled from different sectors and different types of experience. So certainly a good company. Ewan, how about you?

Dr. Ewan Affleck: I don’t know if mine’s circuitous. I guess it is to a degree. I. Fundamentally, I, I never set out to be involved in health data or health data systems. I have no training. In fact, I’m not quite sure why I’m here. No, mt. But I I it

Katie Bryski: sounds like it’s gonna be circuitous. I’m just gonna throw that in.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Yeah. I think it’s getting a little circuitous.

So, I, I’m a physician and I, I’ve spent most of my career working in, in rural and remote Canada. Went to McGill. Our first job, my wife and I went to, to Arctic Quebec on, uh, Hudson Strait. Began working there and I was a new grad and terrified things are coming in through the door of the nursing station and so forth.

And I wasn’t always sure I knew what I was doing or I was quite certain. I knew I didn’t know what I was doing. In any case, it was, it can be scary for a new grad. You have to make decisions about whether to medevac people and order a plane for $15,000 or not. And what dawned on me very early on in that experience was that if I could send images or information of some sort to people down south who had greater knowledge than I, that this would help a lot.

I learned very early that the, the role information plays in healthcare is essential to our capacity to provide quality care. And that I was beholden to that and that the quality of care of the people in the little Inuit village where I was working was compromised because we couldn’t share it in a meaningful way.

That was 30 years ago, over 30 years ago. So I began reading about this staff and that there’s this wild thing called the internet coming. It was just almost simultaneously was being invented. So that was really cool. I thought, wow, this is all gonna change quickly. Little did I know this many years later, decades later, that fundamentally it has not changed significantly.

So anyway, I became interested in this and began pursuing ideas while I continued my clinical practice. And so then I designed and deployed this comprehensive charting system in the Northwest Territories and then realized that. Health data, governance and public policy were the real problem and that the way we are deploying technologies does not consider how we relate to each other.

So that led me to where I am today, that I started this organization, which is now called Network Health as a sort of a movement to help reimagine how we in Canada use health data. So that’s led me to where we are today.

Shelagh Maloney: Both of your stories are similar to the career paths that we’ve heard from a number of podcast guests in that they are in a clinical setting or they are patients, or they are administrators and they recognize there’s something that we can do better.

You both have mentioned network health, and I know that there’s been a, a rebranding, so I suspect that not too many of our listeners will know what network health is. So I wonder if you can give us a brief history and, and congratulations. I see you now have an Ontario division.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Yes. We just launched in Ontario a chapter, it was initially a, you know, with some colleagues in Alberta, Terri and Dave Price and a variety of other people. We thought that we need to take the design and use of health data or certainly the design, the strategic approach to health data and just get together and figure out how we are going to design and use this treasured asset, which really fuels the entire healthcare system.

And so we set out to do that. We didn’t quite know what we were doing initially. This was around six years ago. And we did it strictly around virtual care to start with, which seemed more of a digestible topic, but we were called the Alberta Virtual Care Coordinating Body, and we just started on a whim and a wish sort of and said, let’s see what we can do together.

So there were a whole variety of groups and organizations and individuals around the table initially. And it sort of grew into this thing that seemed to begin to take off. And it’s all been fueled just by graduate student effort and in kind efforts by, by a whole variety of people. And so we were contacted by individuals in BC, Claire, one of them, and said, Hey, this looks interesting.

Can we join? And so we helped them get up and running. And then the same has happened in Ontario.

Katie Bryski: I’m struck too by the diversity of. People that are involved in the collaboratives, even you’ve got yourself as a physician, Claire, obviously the patient experience consultant. But I do also wanna talk a bit about the collective impact model because I’ve, I feel like I’ve heard this coming up in the discourse increasingly so.

I’m curious too about your, your vision for what this kind of model can achieve and why you chose it.

Claire Snyman: Firstly, I mean, as I said with, you know, when I was diagnosed in 2010 with my brain tumor, I went from being just, I would say, a routine patient, someone who went to the doctor every so often and so forth to someone who is very much catapulted into having multiple specialists, multiple appointments, multiple medications, and so having to navigate this very convoluted continuum of care every single day.

And at the baseline of it is obviously the information of all of that. And I suddenly realized I had to be the custodian of it because nobody else was. But unfortunately the system wasn’t set up that way. The system was set up around the system being the custodian of my information. So what I’ve learned, and I’ve joined this whole sort of approach at Network Health, when we think about this and what excites me about the collective impact model is, is it.

We are allowed to break away from sort of this old school way of doing things. What we are doing is we looking to, how can we create a sort of an open, connected space where people can come together around a shared goal instead of somebody else’s agenda? And often when we’ve approached people to actually join our work, that’s what people love about it.

They find it very refreshing. They find it very new and innovative and they’re like, wow, this sounds great. We wanna be part of this. Because of the way that we are sort of doing this approach is through the collective impact model. And for me, from a patient’s perspective, when I think about sort of my vision, what this model can achieve, I think it’s, it’s pretty simple.

I want a system where I can access my health information, my story. I think that’s just a given. It shouldn’t be it. Just default. It’s not something that I should sort of have to fight for, navigate on an endless day-to-day basis. Um, I live with my conditions 24 7. I only see my doctors for a very short time period, but I’m the one in the background being the custodian of what happens 24 7.

And so when we gather people from. Always loves it. I love the way he says it, the big tent. Anyone who is touching health data, so it’s me as a patient. I actually always used to think the only people who needed access to health data were myself and my doctor. Now really seeing and understanding this, it’s myself as patients.

It’s the doctor, it’s anybody in public health. It’s the researchers. There’s a big tent of people who are understanding and needing to access health data that we need around this table, and that’s the beauty of collective impact. We talk about everybody who needs to be at the table having these discuss.

And I think by also being non-aligned, but we are not under an organizational mandate. We are under the mandate of our group, and that is key. That’s what makes us being able to be nimble and being able to be sort of a mindset changer, I think is. Some people, it takes them a while to like figure us out.

Like, where do you fit? Are you under this ministry of health sort of structure? And we’re like, no. We’re aligned to the mandate of our group and to our health data design principles, and that is what makes us unique. That’s where I hope this model can actually achieve something in the future.

Shelagh Maloney: Thank you.

That was a really comprehensive explanation. I love your, you know, a group of people who want to make an impact, who are choosing to do this.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: It’s actually very intentional what we have done, if you go to the heart of the problem, we were not structured coherently to design health data in Canada. And this is reified in our legislation.

Health information acts that, that each custodian has portions, for instance, of Claire’s data is broken up and then it’s further broken up administratively across provinces and territories. And then we deploy technology within that fragmented environment. So it fragments information. Our response to COVID, you can’t get data.

So the government launches the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy. Why is this happening? So it doesn’t work the way we are doing this. So we very intentionally asked this question then, if this is a problem, how do you fix it? It is not a technical problem. It is manifest as that, and it is harming Canadians.

It is harming the healthcare system, it’s harming providers. We didn’t actually know we were doing collective impact the first few years. We just designed very intentionally a common vision for how we all needed. To design data and ’cause we said, well, either we appoint some king or czar or queen of data and who says everyone has to behave the same way.

It’s not gonna happen. Or else we either all gotta get together in a room and agree on a common approach to design. Those are the two choices. So we got everyone in a room and we gathered all these people in Alberta and. At the beginning I said, it’s gonna fail. I told the first grad student, this is like a disastrous idea.

It’s like gonna fail, so let’s just enjoy the ride as we go down. But it seems to have grown and you know, where will this go from here? I don’t know. It was like a few years in that we found this thing called collective impact that then seemed to align with what we were saying. And so it’s a formalized system that was designed, uh, at Stanford University in 2011.

But the point is that we have to reimagine, we have to get together and redesign health data according to a common agenda, and that that’s declared through the. The Pan-Canadian Health Data Charter that actually arose from our work in Alberta was taken to the Expert Advisory group of the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy.

I was the chair of, of the Governance and Policy Working group, and we turned that into the charter. And so there that was a manifestation of a common agenda or a common vision for data use in Canada.

Katie Bryski: I always find it strangely validating when a good idea have come up with turns it to already be a real thing makes me feel like I’m in good company.

I did have a question though. So you mentioned, you know, the broad tent, you mentioned getting everyone into agreement. I imagine though that people must have different perspectives and priorities and incentives. So how do you facilitate that collaboration and actually get everyone working and driving in the same direction?

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Katie, very, very intelligent and insightful comment. You just need patience and time and you need also humility that you’re maybe pretty screwed up too, and you’re that, that we all have our preconceptions, right? And it is not intuitive to people to have a non-aligned group of individuals that actually don’t report to any given structure.

We’ve been told, you know, like, so who are you? And, and some of the grad students working with just said, who are these people? You’re, you’re helping? Well, they’re a collective. No, no, no. Yeah, but who do they report to? Well, not really anyone. They have a common set of principles. No, no, you don’t understand me.

Who do they report to? This goes around. You know, the grad, I think they couldn’t get their head around the fact that we don’t really have a formal boss, as it were. But that is the deeply empowering thing that we are accountable. So every report we create is accountable to our set of principles, which is accountable to the Pan-Canadian Health Data charter, but that aligns all our work.

Whether it, it, it be Interoperability Saves Lives, Data Disarray, Disconnected Care. These reports are vetted to ensure they actually. Uphold our set of principles. That is the basis upon which we can release a report. If they contravene our principles, then they need to be changed and all the people around the table vet the principles annually and make sure they are evergreen and uphold.

It’s a novel governance model and it, and it ultimately the charter holds us accountable to the, to the Canada Health Act and the principles of the Canada Health Act.

Katie Bryski: Claire, I’d like to come back to something that you mentioned, how it was really when you became a patient in the health system, that you really saw the gaps and you really understood who needs to be able to access your data and what some of the implications are.

And at the recent eHealth Conference, there was a lot of talk about public health data literacy and how a mobilized engaged public can also be instrumental in driving change. So I’d love to chat a little bit about what do you think people need to know? One, they are just casual health system users to be able to be part of this movement that you’re creating together.

Claire Snyman: And that is a great question because I think often people don’t realize what’s behind the curtains, behind the scenes. Until they actually ask to step behind there as a patient. I think most people think that everything operates like your banking, that you’re gonna have full visibility on everything and all your data about you, and that’s completely not the case for me.

When we are thinking about, first is about awareness, is how do we drive awareness of the current status quo of the health data environment in Canada to the public? What does that look like and why is it important? I think the why is critical. This is a patient safety issue. It really is. When we don’t have the health data accessible that is of good quality and is able to be used both by myself actually as a patient, ’cause I can pick up things.

But also very importantly by my healthcare team, we have big challenges. But I, I just don’t think people are a hundred percent aware of that until they become a patient or have a loved one who is a patient or are directly involved in healthcare system. So for me, I think that’s what it is, how people can actually become involved in that as a public, you know, people’s voices are so instrumental.

People’s stories, stories are actually what drive change for me. That’s where I started actually. After my brain tumor, my brain surgery, I started to write. I then used my story to eventually say, I’m gonna hope that helps people who don’t feel so alone when they’ve had a brain tumor surgery and a brain injury.

I think when we hear people’s stories about maybe how they are able to access, not access their information about themselves or their loved one. How we might learn from that, how we might be able to use the, use those stories to drive change. Because stories are how we learn from each other. They’re how we sort of translate and cross the bridge.

Well, it’s also how we bring face to data. It’s like, we know this exists, but when we actually hear the story about, did you know this is actually what happened to me because my neurologist, my GP. Everybody here didn’t have a true information in hand electronically. When I arrived in the emergency department and told them I’d had this for 10 days, they just gave me IV migraine means and sent me home when my brain was swollen and my brain tumor had doubled in size.

So when we don’t have that information, I think. That’s key. So I think engaging people and saying, your voice matters. How do we do that? And how do we allow people to know they can do that and bring people into the movement there? But I think awareness and storytelling are really integral to the whole purpose.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: That’s what unifies us, all these stories and like for me, Claire can speak about this. I’ve been on the other end of the bed, right, or other side of the bed where I did not have information about patients and it became problematic. We make decisions that are unsafe. It’s a horrible feeling. And around the table in our group, we have researchers who can’t do researchers, innovators, who can’t do innovation, patients, who we realize we have a shared experience.

And in fact, what we’re doing now with ai, we have a a, a data science group, is we’ve actually created synthetic patients and we’re altering the quality and access to information these synthetic patients. And we’re looking at the impact on diagnostic accuracy, and we’re showing that it is eroding. Which is intuitive, but it’s actually never been done.

So we’re working on these protocols now.

Katie Bryski: Staying with the storytelling for a minute. I was fascinated actually while doing the prep for this episode to find out that you are both storytellers in different ways. So Claire, you spoke about your writing, but Ewan, you also write and you’ve done some filmmaking as well.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Yeah, so I, I’ve written and produced a film called The Unforgotten, and I’ve also written a variety of chapters and books. Creative writing as well. And that’s really, actually, it’s sort of bizarre. I’m a doctor because my mother told me not to be, and I come from a family where everyone’s either a filmmaker or a writer or an artist of some sort.

So I, I was a rebellious act on my part to become a physician, but I must admit, I found the medical community at some times. It’s very constraining. So at one point a number of years ago, I said, I, I feel like making a film or doing something different. And I asked myself the question, if you, you can see one patient at a time, but what if you create something like a film that tells a story that can change many people at a time?

And so having worked in indigenous populations, by the way, I’m wholly and 100% non-indigenous, but. We made a film about this with a variety of partners, Alika Lafontaine, and Marie Wilson, and a whole bunch of people, and Leela Gilday and so forth, and most, most of whom are Indigenous. And we looked at the impact of healthcare systems on Indigenous People in Canada.

So that was, it was a really great adventure. So, I, I don’t disagree with Claire. We, part of what we’re doing is trying to retell, uh, the story of data here in Canada. And cultural shifts take a while. We are intentionally non blameworthy in our work. I don’t believe anyone has intentionally caused this, so we work very closely now with CIHI, with Infoway, with the government of Alberta because we actually need each other.

We need to co reinvent this. We are collective victims of the analog structures that don’t really work for health data. So the only way that’s gonna change is if we all work together and, and stop blaming each other. We all in Canada need each other to reinvent this.

Shelagh Maloney: Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause I don’t know that there’s a blame.

It is just, there’s more of a, apathy’s probably not the right word, but this is the way it’s always been and we can’t, it’s too big, we can’t change it. And so, you know, here’s my question to you. So networked health, and now you’re certainly gaining momentum and got lots of people on board. You’re making friends, you’ve got lots of relationships.

What does success look like? So Claire, six months, a year, two years from now, you know, you changing culture does not happen overnight. It will take a long time. Do you have specific sort of things that you’d like to accomplish in the short, medium, and long term?

Claire Snyman: Yeah, and I think you’re right. There’s definitely the short, medium, and long term that we look at here.

And one thing that I’ve definitely learned is patience because I think as much as I would love to say, let’s swing this on sort of a flick our fingers and we’ll, everything will change. I still have the majority of my information from 2010. The way I access it is very similar now in 2025. What I would like to say is in the short term, I would like to see that we have continuing relationships and trust that are being built across that big tent, because I think that is fundamental to the work that we are doing, as Yuan was saying, is, is that we have people who continue to understand and more friends that we are making around all different sectors because when we do that together, the work that we are doing becomes easier to do together.

We can’t do this alone. So I think short term that is essential. I think medium to long term. We’ve spoken about access to data, we’ve spoken about quality of data and we’ve spoken about use of data. I think those always become sort of, and how those all relate to the Pan-Canadian Health Data charter and the principles of those and how when I look at in BC, we have our health data principles that are sort of rooted in the Pan-Canadian health data charter.

Myself as a patient, that primary principle, the top one, is about person centered health data. So for me, if I was to look more medium to long term, I would say we are looking towards a system that is rooted and saying our system is designed and driven around the person. I know for some people that’s a mindset change ’cause they’re like, oh, it’s always gotta be patient driven.

This is actually benefits everyone in the healthcare system, not only me as Claire SMA and patient, but my son who’s not a patient. But it impacts you as well, who is the provider as well. It impacts the research because when. My data is centered around myself as a patient or person. That means it follows me across my whole continuum of care, and that means it’s more accessible.

Number one, we spoke about. That also means that the quality of it hopefully is better, and also we’re able to use it. So for me, when I think about sort of short term, we are looking about those relationships, getting people on board, understanding how we can all actually work together, but that medium to long term is how do we really embed that person centered health data architecture into our system?

’cause for me, that is how we’re gonna push forward and make this work.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Yeah, I mean the, the one thing I would say about this is: patience. So normal strategic cycles, like you do a three year strategy and then you have a set of deliverables. We have abandoned that. We have a set of principles for the ultimate destination, and we do not dictate how long it’s going to take to get there.

This is very intentional. We say, we’ll just continue. We don’t know. We know where we wanna go, and if it takes 35 years or if it takes seven or it takes 19, who cares? And things will change, but you incrementally and you adaptively iterate on issues to learn to make this better. And so that is really it.

What I’ve been very surprised by is the speed to which we have been able to influence public policy in Canada. I am totally shocked, in fact, as I said it, because I thought my first this, this endeavor is gonna fail. Well, little do we know, around four years later, after we started, Terri Price is the co-chair of the Alberta chapter, and I were invited by the federal government, by Mark Holland, the then Minister of Health to introduce Bill C 72.

And so we introduced that and we were told that. Our work that interoperability saved lives helped. They, they were working on interoperability legislation one way or another, but that this enabled it to occur because it demonstrated that harm was happening, which is our thesis in it. The lack of interoperability is harming Canadians.

It tells the story, as Claire had said, and let’s be honest, it it’s because of confederation and the separation of powers. It was unclear to people who actually had, whether it was a federal government or provincial territorial governments who had oversight over over data legislation. We looked into this in our later work and it, it’s unclear data is not acknowledged as one of the domains of oversight that are separated through the Canada Health Act, but the point is, we’re harming Canadians and really, we need to forget about our differences. ’cause our fundamental accountability is to stop harming each other or to promote the health and wellbeing of Canadians. But to come full circle, we’re, we’re trying to change the story here and the reason the story can become compelling is it actually benefits everyone.

So often when you’re looking at issues, you know, it doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone, but the governments will benefit, patients will benefit, providers will benefit by a reimagined use of data, and that is a powerful story to tell.

Katie Bryski: So, to close off this story then, and bring us to our, our final chapter.

If you had to describe in one word what digital health means to you personally, what’s the last word that you would write in that story?

Claire Snyman: Now you’re putting the pressure on I’m, I’m feeling, I’m feeling the pressure. One word. I was gonna say innovation, but that’s really, um, I was gonna say, it’s not very innovative by using that one word.

Ewan, you look like you’re ready to go.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Data.

Claire Snyman: Oh, well done. Okay. I’m gonna, I’m gonna go off data and I’m gonna say safety.

Shelagh Maloney: I’m looking for you to wrap it up, Katie, ’cause I know we could go on forever.

Katie Bryski: You know what, thank you so much for the conversation today. I think we’ve covered some really rich ground and I’ve really appreciated the depths to which we’ve gone and it’s been a compelling story as we work through the challenges in our health data landscape now and where we could go together in the future.

Thank you so much.

Dr. Ewan Affleck: Thank you very much Katie and Shelagh, and, really appreciate the opportunity.

Shelagh Maloney: Well, there’s another example of a conversation that could have gone on for a, a number of hours.

Katie Bryski: Yeah. You know what? I think if I was curating a playlist of our podcast episodes, it would be really great to listen to this. Conversation right after the one that we had with Helen Angus and Rosalie Wyonch about health policy and navigating some of those structures that we discussed during today’s podcast.

Any listeners wanna have a, a re-listen to get a full perspective on this issue? I, I think that would be the order I would do it in.

Shelagh Maloney: Yeah, that’s a really great point. And I think increasingly this is digital health and a lot of our. Episodes and last season were around projects. I think increasingly it’s sort of we’re getting into other areas that are absolutely within the digital health umbrella, but being very mindful that digital health isn’t just about technology and projects that are advancing technology and, and I think.

There’s so many common threads and themes and you know, that patient-centeredness and the changing the culture and people wanting to make a difference. So it’s reinforcing those attitudes and initiatives to me.

Katie Bryski: But I think it also speaks to this specific medium as a forum, right, for discussion and bringing these different perspectives in.

And it’s almost like it becomes a greater discussion about the state of our digital health system, which is why I may be not surprised we’ve moved beyond. Pilot project, if you will, approach to this kind of deeper discussion about the infrastructure. ’cause I think that’s where the conversation in our sector is going anyway.

So it’s maybe not surprising to see it manifest here. So something I reflected on with this collective impact model, it made me think, I feel like some really interesting work in Canadian healthcare has happened sort of in the interstitial areas. I was thinking of the way this collective impact model doesn’t report to a single body, but it kind of exists betwixt and between many, and it actually kind of reminded me of the way the Pan-Canadian Health organizations are set up to provide that perspective across different jurisdictions, but sort of be able to work between levels of government across different governments and organizations and other players in the health system.

So yeah, it’s, it’s kind of that boundary spanning in Canadian healthcare that I think is an interesting thing we’ve maybe tried without realizing it.

Shelagh Maloney: It’s a great point. I think it underscores the need for governance and the need for relationships and patient literacy and digital literacy among a lot of the health organizations as well.

So yeah, it’s a, it’s an interesting model and because if only we just stop everything and let’s figure out AI and, and don’t do anything until ai, until we have all those structures in place, the parameters around which you can use it well. That’s not possible. And so, and I wonder if that’s a blessing or a curse in this case.

’cause you’re not gonna have time to figure it out. But we’re doing it anyway and we’re looking at different ways of doing it because the current methodology or the current structures don’t work. So I, I wonder if it’ll be helpful or harmful to this collective impact model. And, and maybe it’s completely irrelevant from that perspective.

Katie Bryski: Or maybe it’s a both/and. Right? Maybe there is some of this building the flying machine on the way down, which is not to say you shouldn’t also have some of the existing systems, but maybe you need something else as well. Was there anything that stood out to you in this conversation or that you took away that maybe you weren’t expecting to?

Shelagh Maloney: It was a, it was a great conversation and I think again. It focuses the thinking a little bit and I think the progress that they’ve been able to accomplish and the wave and the support and you know, the fact that now there’s Networked Health BC and Networked Health Ontario, I suspect it won’t be much more time before we see more of them.

And the number of members who are part of the Networked Health Initiative and Collective Impact Initiative is growing very quickly, which is a very positive initiative.

Katie Bryski: Absolutely. And you know the story of Digital Health will continue of course on this podcast. So we’ll be back next month with the next chapter right here on Digital Health in Canada, the Digital Health Canada podcast.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Digital Health Canada members can continue the conversation online in the community hub. Visit digital health canada.com to learn more. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes as soon as they’re available and tell a friend if you like the show.

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