Health Data Sovereignty: Systems, Safeguards, Strategy

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

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Canada has a real opportunity here because of two fundamental Canadian values of public healthcare system and immigration.

Katie Bryski: Hello and welcome to Digital Health in Canada, the Digital Health Canada podcast. I’m Katie Bryski, and today I am flying solo, but never fear: my co-host Shelagh Maloney will be back at the end of the episode to share some of her thoughts and her reflections on the conversation today.

What does it take to protect a key strategic asset – our health data – in an era of accelerating AI?

In this episode, we explore why strong data governance and sovereignty is a strategic imperative for Canada and the digital health future we stand to build or lose. Joining us in the virtual studio today, I am thrilled to welcome two leaders in this space. We have Dr. Kumanan Wilson, specialist in general internal medicine at the Ottawa Hospital; Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Bruyère Health Research Institute; Vice President Research and Academic Affairs, Bruyère Health; and Chief Scientific Officer of CANImmunize, Inc.

We are also thrilled to welcome Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. Thank you both so much for being here. It’s a pleasure to have you.

Michael Geist: Thanks so much for having us.

Katie Bryski: As longtime listeners know, this podcast is about digital health and it’s also about leadership and the journeys that we take as leaders in this space.

So I’d love to start by asking about your own career journeys. You know, where you started out and where you’ve ended up now. Kumanan, why don’t we start with you?

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Sure. Mine’s somewhat circuitous. I’m a general internist by training and I did a master in epi, but really I was interested in policy, and law and policy, and early on gravitated towards public health.

I wrote a lot of papers on public health and immunization in particular. What are the impacts of those papers? It’s hard to know. Then after H1N1 one of our friends, a neighbor in the park, complained to me, she just came here from Silicon Valley and said, “I can do my banking on my phone. Why the heck don’t you have the yellow cards on our phone?”

And I said, “That sounds like a great idea,” but I didn’t know how to code. So I hired a friend of the family, a first year engineering student who taught himself how to code over the summer, hear from him and said, “Hey, I built it.” And we just went ahead and released it and Apple contacted us and said, “Well, we’ve been waiting for someone to do this. This seemed like an obvious application.”

And I think that would’ve been the first immunization app at the time. Then I started to immediately see that a lot of the policy issues I was grappling with in immunization could be solved by technology. And that led to us being funded by the federal government.

While at the Ottawa Hospital, we built an mHealth lab to help other scientists. But eventually it became apparent that in order to sustain these enterprises, we need to have a commercial entity. So we spun out of the Ottawa Hospital and took possession of the IP right before the COVID pandemic. We scaled from five to 50 people in like four months, supported Nova Scotia, Yukon, PEI, through the pandemic, and also built the standards for immunization for the country, helped with vaccine safety surveillance, and helped bring in the vaccine injury compensation program.

Katie Bryski: I think in addition to having circuitous routes, many of our guests have done a similar thing where they see something they want to make better in the system, and they find a way to do so. Michael, I’d love to hear your journey as well.

Michael Geist: It’s, I think, more boring than Kumanan’s. I’ve been a law professor at the University of Ottawa for like 27 years or so, and I did grad work at a few universities around the world, uh, after law school, ended up in academia and was one of the first in the country to really be focusing on, on the digital environment, internet, legal regulation and the like in the late 1990s.

And I would say that the last 25 plus years has, has really been focused, especially being in Ottawa, looking at the intersection between law, technology, and policy. And so that’s traversed issues like intellectual property and copyright related issues, internet regulations, some of the communications related issues, and privacy has been a big part of the equation, unsurprisingly, as well as data’s become such an important part of, of that environment.

Even if we go back 20 years ago, there was some thought and focus on sort of some of the data sovereignty issues and questions about what happens to data in a world where networks easily cross borders, data moves across borders, and what happens? The effectiveness of applying Canadian privacy rules. And so it was a big issue in the early 2000s and it has now resurfaced.

And so I’m not, I haven’t been focused on health per se, but it is one of the most tangible and I think, important applications when we start thinking about data, data sovereignty, and the applicability of Canadian privacy law. And so that’s in a sense how I came to some of these issues.

Katie Bryski: You sold that as not an interesting story, but I think anything interdisciplinary is inherently interesting.

And it’s, I think, a great example of how digital health draws in these other perspectives because it is itself an inherently interdisciplinary field. And just picking up on your, your comments about data sovereignty and data governance. It’s interesting preparing for this episode because I think I am probably most familiar with data sovereignty actually, in the context of indigenous data sovereignty.

It’s like First Nations Principles of OCAP^®, Métis Principles of OCAS, Inuit qaujimajatuqangit. And that’s, that’s not really the context we’re talking about data sovereignty in today. So to set the stage for the listeners, I wonder if you could both share a little bit about what it means to you and, and why data sovereignty is something that people should be paying attention to now.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: I’ll tell the origin story of our collaboration. So we had the company, CANImmunize and it was actually not a company at the time. We were at the Ottawa Hospital and we were putting the data on a cloud server, and I believe we were one of the first to put our data on the AWS instance that was located geographically in Canada in health, a first uh, health entity to do that.

So AWS actually wrote a case study on it. And at that time, as Michael explained, the belief was that would allow for Canadians to have control of their data. And this became a big issue after September 11^th and the Patriot Act. Can the US access our data for serving less purposes? And, and the feeling was if it’s geographically located on Canadian soil, we’re okay at some level.

That didn’t make a lot of sense to me because it’s still an American company and it can be pulled out of those servers. But that seemed to be the understanding of the time after the election of Trump and the change in our geopolitical status assumptions that we had before needed to be reexamined. And we were fortunate, we have a world famous legal expert in this area at my university.

So I, I reached out to Michael and I said, Michael, does this make any sense? Is this right? And, uh, I think coincidentally or not, coincidentally, you had written a paper about 20 years ago in, in my alma mater, UNB, UNB Law Journal on this topic.

And I said, well, maybe we should revisit this, look at this in more depth. And we wrote an op-ed for the globe, and then we followed it up with, uh, an academic paper for the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Michael Geist: I’ll just supplement that by noting that my perspective on these issues, and it’s become a, a hot topic in my world around digital policy is actually a bit of a broader framing than just data sovereignty.

It’s frankly been about digital sovereignty, and I would say the data sovereignty is a subset of that broader digital sovereignty question. And so digital sovereignty, which also has been. Really driven a bit by sort of some of the concerns around current US administration and the sense that there are risks in being over reliant on US entities, whether for the provision of storage of data or other kinds of internet based services.

And then layering on top of that control over Canadian data and where it resides, I think has sparked a lot of discussion around questions about, you know, how much control does Canada have? And that includes over its networks, it includes over the service providers that offer up a whole range of different services.

And then it also includes the data piece of it. And as Kumanan mentions, the data side’s been around for quite a while. That piece that he mentioned that I wrote a couple decades ago came up in the context of health data of the prospect that the government of British Columbia was gonna outsource some of the management of its health data to the private sector.

At the time, it became clear that the entities that were most likely to get that contract were were US based. And so it started to raise these questions of what would it mean to take data that previously had been not just in Canada, but under the control of the very governments that were doing the collecting of that data.

What would it mean to suddenly hand this over? Both to the private sector and to a private sector, uh, that was in another jurisdiction that certainly could, you could try to make it subject to Canadian law, but clearly would be subject to US laws as well. And, and this was taking place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the USA Patriot Act.

And so there were a lot of concerns about, you know, what law would apply to that data. And in some ways, we are seeing the same echoes take place today.

Katie Bryski: Interesting because it seems to me, and having read some of your op-eds, Michael, it’s this question of where, where does one set of rights stop and the next begin, right?

Michael Geist: You know, I think they coexist in many respects, right? I mean, conflict of laws is an area that has been around for a very long time, and so it’s often the case that more than one law can apply. The question becomes what happens when those laws conflict? And if they do, then whose law trumps? No pun intended.

Right? So which law will govern in the context of. Two laws that might be applied to either the same data or the same sets of circumstances, the same contract, whatever it happens to be. And what happens if some of the obligations that arise outta that legislation conflict. And so the entity that has control of the data, the contract, whatever we’re talking about, can really only comply with one.

How do they decide to govern themselves?

Katie Bryski: I wanna ask how do they decide to govern themselves? But I sense that’s a much bigger conversation.

Michael Geist: We can get into it. I mean, the short answer is that it, well, the, the legal answer would be, it depends. I mean, the short answer I think in many respects is well, both, which law is most directly applicable based on where the organization happens to be located and what threats or hammer in a sense does that local jurisdiction have to try to force compliance.

If you are a US based company and you say, listen, I’m facing these competing obligations, chances are you’re still gonna comply with the US court order before you worry about a Canadian law or a Canadian court order. And to a certain extent, the reverse would be true here in Canada, but not always. And so that’s why this issue, especially around health data sovereignty, become so important because I think there is this fear that we may find ourselves in this kind of conflict situation.

How does the entity that now has control over that information make that call?

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: I think when we wrote this, Michael, it’s a more theoretical than it’s turned out to be less than theoretical now, and I just came across this of recent that the US has been engaging in bilateral agreements with the African nations to support health systems, but in exchange for data pathogen and, uh, potentially health systems data.

So they, they have a lot of interest in this data.

Katie Bryski: And the geopolitical situation has obviously changed quite significantly, but I think another huge factor that we’re seeing is AI, right? And that AI adoption and acceleration. How do you see that changing or adding to the conversation about data sovereignty?

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: So I think when this occurred after September 11th, the, the issue of why the US would want our data for surveillance purposes. Now they’re the second reason data becomes valuable or invaluable. And that’s for economic development. Canada has a real opportunity here because of two fundamental Canadian values of public healthcare system and immigration.

We have a truly population-based health data set, and it looks like the world. And in the era of ai, this is the lifeblood of what’s gonna be driving that, and it’s a natural resource. So renewable, natural resources, others have mentioned. This positions Canada in a really good position to lead the health AI initiatives.

But the question is, who owns that data? And, and I think that’s where there is uncertainty and ambiguity. And it is quite possible that our data could be used by other entities without our awareness. But we obviously would like to have two things happen. One is we would like to ensure that Canadian control, private corporations and Canadian health institutions use our data to make our health system better and provide economic growth and also at least be aware of when other countries are potentially using our data.

Michael Geist: I mean, I would just add to that and it, it’ll be obvious to any of you listeners that focus closely on AI, but the secret sauce in many respects when we’re talking about leadership in AI is that combination of compute power, the algorithms that are developed by these various companies, but critically important, of course, becomes data itself.

And so there has been this huge rush, effectively, almost a gold rush, given the money that’s at stake to hoover up as much data as possible. And you know, I think health data in particular provides a really interesting use case around ai. You know, we’ve seen some amount of skepticism and concern around some of the generative AI tools that are out there, and it will raise a myriad of questions around things like copyright related issues, especially as, uh, we’re talking around software coding, but it could be legal services.

I mean, it’s touching on a whole range of different things, but you know, in the health space, it provides a really valuable use case. I think it’s easy to see how the more health data you have, the better the system’s outputs and the more predictive some of those outputs are likely to be. And so that in many respects, to the extent to which the ability to come up with some of the algorithms and, and some of the machine learning tools, the ability to go out and buy large amount of compute power, those aren’t easy things.

Those are the things where there is less scarcity in the sense that if you have the resources, you can go out and do it. Health data though, is finite in the sense that if you’re looking at true health data, not synthetic or you know, just machine generated health data, the real stuff has real value and that’s why this issue’s become as important as it’s become in especially as come in notes in the last number of months.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Just as terrible as we may perceive it to be that a country that says they want to economically take us over uses our data to build algorithms. That’s still probably a better scenario than nobody using our data to build algorithms. Like we, we don’t want algorithms built on other populations imported into the Canadian healthcare system, that may or may not work on our populations.

We need to have our data utilized. To be designed for Canadians, to maximize the outcome for Canadians, ideally by Canadians, but at least by someone.

Katie Bryski: I guess there’s an interesting question there, like, is it better to have an algorithm at least that was trained on our data, even if we don’t get the economic benefit from it necessarily?

Michael Geist: That’s true. I, I, I’d respond by saying, listen, I, I think that, but both can be true. I think that we can see the societal health benefits from having. Good health AI systems and if they are made better through our health data and population is ultimately beneficiary of those better systems, then that that’s a good thing.

At the same time, our system costs money and the ability to generate revenues out of that and to a certain extent, have some greater amount of control over how that data is used is also something that’s good. And so in some ways this is. It’s a case of where we’d like to have our cake and eat it too. I think we’d like to see the health benefits, but we’d also like to see some of the other benefits that might accrue.

It’s true half a cake is better than no cake at all in this context, and so it’s better to see this information used, but if we’ve got the ability to try to put into place some policies that put us towards a track where we become a real player in this space for our own benefit, but frankly for the benefit of many others, then why not pursue it?

Katie Bryski: You know, we had Dr. Anderson Chuck and Dr. Fahad Razak on a recent episode talking about some of the things that make Canada’s data set so valuable and, and some of the potential economic opportunities. I’d love to hear from you a little bit more of your perspective on what concretely we stand to win or lose if we don’t sort of have those strong data governance and data sovereignty.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: One of my areas of interest in immunization. And you know, in the old world we were very comfortable having partners and relying on them and sharing data with them, and that world unfortunately, does not appear to be there right now. So we need to build our own systems and have robust systems and have sovereignty over those systems.

CANImmunize and CIHI have been partnering on this and, and we have the capacity and we, we will be demonstrating it a, a building, an immunization information system that we think would be the best in the world. And that has benefits first for Canadian health, but it can also provide opportunities for vaccine industry who may need to have the assurance of robust systems in order to make investments.

So that, that’s a very specific example of a real opportunity for us that addresses both our health system. It also creates other benefits.

Michael Geist: Kumanan is best positioned, obviously to speak to some of the specific health related examples, but I guess I would highlight that I think there are both risks and opportunities that are at play here.

And you know, some of the risks will be apparent to people that if we don’t have control either of the data, but even more of some of the, the companies themselves and organizations that are leaders in the space, then you’re effectively beholden to some of those organizations. And there’s always going to be this fear, especially in the current environment, that what happens if they turn the tap off?

What happens if. They say that Canada’s not a market that they’re prepared to serve, or it’s a market that they’re going to come to later. You know, we saw that of course, with the mad scramble years ago with the COVID vaccine and questions as to when was it going to come to Canada, and if you did not have a a player and production facilities here, well then you were beholden to others, in effect, to make some of those choices.

And so some of the risks there became readily apparent. They’re not as necessarily always apparent right now, but they may arise in the future. And that’s part of what’s driving this. But I also think it’s a function of looking at where the opportunities are. You know, we could go through sort of the evolution of digital over the last couple of decades and look at the major players in search and in social media, and you know, now in ai.

Over the years there at times have been some players in Canada that might have been global leaders in the space, the kind of household names in the way that the Googles and the, the Metas and the TikToksof the world are today. And yet for whatever reason, they are not the, the household names. It’s rare to find the Canadian entities that, that are those leaders.

There are exceptions. Um, we see it in e-commerce with Shopify. For the most part, the big global players are not from here. And so if we look at this space as being a place that is going to offer up a huge amount of economic opportunity and benefit, well then, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if Canada was seen as one of the leaders in this space as, as it unfolds in the years to come?

Katie Bryski: So from, again, like a data governance perspective, from a law perspective, what would it take to get us from, okay, great, we have this great data set to actually being able to leverage and make use of it.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: So, uh, maybe I’ll, I’ll start with sort of what Michael and I, mainly Michael, came up with when we were finding solutions to protect our data.

So we sort of thought of a multi-pronged approach. The first is encryption by design. Always thought, well, encryption should do it, except apparently in, or most data is manipulated in the cloud, so it has to be unencrypted, so snapshots can be taken. And, and so that still creates the vulnerability, uh, data localization, at least the potential for some protection, some conflict of laws, and, uh, and could create the, the conflict of law that Michael alluded to.

And then Michael’s suggestion, which I’ll let him expand on of a blocking statute. Ultimately we wanted to develop domestic sovereign Canadian cloud servers. Easier said than done. Those cloud giants are cloud giants for a lot of reasons. They do provide great service. Another suggestion I’ve heard is the air gapping, which is sort of going back in time to have it disconnected, sort of hard drives, but obviously functionality issues arise when you go back into solutions like that maybe might go, you expand on on some of those ideas.

Michael Geist: Yeah, sure. No, so I’m happy to, so, you know, when they say, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re a law professor, everything looks like a legal issue to, to be solved. And so my focus has been really more on, on some of those legal questions. And Kumanan sort of alluded to some of the issues here.

I mean, the question for me comes down, especially on this data side, is to what extent can Canada establish rules that provide some certain amount of safeguards or better assurance that Canadian law will apply. To that data and, and one of the reasons for that is both, I think to provide public confidence and trust in the use of their health data.

Of course, this is amongst the most sensitive kind of information that’s out there, so people will, I think, unsurprisingly have concerns about where is their data going, how is it being used? And so you want to have frameworks in place that can provide. Some of those kinds of assurances that in fact it is well protected in an appropriate fashion, and that people’s choices about how they’d like to see that information used or not used is properly respected.

Now, the concern is. If the data’s outside the jurisdiction, or even if it’s in Canada, but subject to someone else’s laws, can you provide those assurances? And that’s where you have to start getting into questions about creating not just a better Canadian privacy law, because it is now widely acknowledged within the Canadian privacy community that our general privacy rules are woefully outdated.

They date back more than 25 years now. We see what’s happened in some other jurisdictions. They’ve moved far ahead of where we’re at, so we of course need to update the laws, but we also need to contemplate how do we ensure that those laws are respected, even when there may be the kind of conflict that we talked about earlier, that instance where a Canadian privacy law may potentially conflict with another privacy.

You get into things that are referred to as blocking statutes, the idea that there are real penalties there, so that it’s a law that is not just about sort of virtue signaling the importance of privacy, but actually taking it truly seriously with real consequences when it isn’t respected.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Michael, my understanding is Switzerland has used this for their banking information.

Michael Geist: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, that’s the example that’s most often used in the context of a blocking statute, and it’s a pretty well known one when people think about banking information and this notion that somehow Swiss banks will will keep that information private. Now, there of course, exceptions to that, but generally speaking, that is the case.

And the reason that’s the case is that there are real penalties associated with violations of the obligations to keep that information private or confidential. And so where there might be a case, let’s say before a US court that is seeking disclosure of that information, the Swiss bank is in a position to say, listen, we are ourselves, you know, between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Here we’ve got your, your court, your rules. We also have what we see is our obligations locally, and if we do not comply with our. Local obligations we’re facing some real risks and consequences. And it’s not that the US court is guaranteed to take that into account, but they are far more likely to do so if there are those kind of consequences in place.

And one of the ongoing concerns about the Canadian system has been, frankly, the lack of consequences for, uh, not complying with Canadian privacy rules.

Katie Bryski: Something with teeth essentially, is what I’m hearing.

Michael Geist: Exactly. I mean, that, that, that’s exactly what we’re really talking about at the end of the day.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Just to your point earlier, Katie, but interdisciplinarity and I think disciplines need to come together for the benefit of the country and, and we need people like Michael and his team, legal experts to, to help us along the way. On this, I will say, Michael, Vanessa will be happy. We, there’s gonna be a partnership at the University of Ottawa between the Faculty of Medicine, the Faculty of Law. Acronym, HALO: Health, AI, and Law in Ottawa.

Where we’ll be committed to this area. They have world leading experts in law and technology, Michael and his colleagues, uh, and in health as well at the University of Ottawa. And we have some of the best data sets in the world and in Ottawa as well. And bringing that expertise together can, I think, hopefully help us move forward in a positive way.

Katie Bryski: So in the spirit of bringing in other perspectives and not withstanding the incredible talent that we have in Canada, do you think there’s lessons that we can learn from other countries approaches like we brought up the Swiss banks, but I’m also looking at things like the European Health Data Space.

Michael Geist: Well, I think we have to be looking at other jurisdictions because we are in effect in that global competition and regulatory arbitrage or regulatory differences is, is a real thing. And so. You need to be thinking about not just what are the best rules for Canada, but what are the best rules for Canada in the context of competing with other jurisdictions who may be establishing some of their own sets of rules.

Now the European initiative around seeking to develop the European health data space. Speaking of long-term, I mean that’s truly a long-term initiative where some of the early stages of past, but we’re talking about things that won’t take effect for quite a few years and the timelines that they’ve got for some of the aspects of this run into the 2030s as far as, I think it’s 2035.

I guess I would say that one of the challenges I think that we face is that I’m not sure that they’re getting it right or not. I think we’ve seen instances where the so-called Brussels effect, where Europe tries to be first on an issue and influence other sets of rules around the world. At times, that’s been an effective strategy.

I think generally in the data protection space, that’s gone well for them With the GDPR in other instances, not so much, and AI would be an example where the EU AI Act has fallen out of favor a little bit in comparison to what I think the Europeans had in mind. So I think we have to certainly be cognizant and see what’s taking place, see what other jurisdictions are doing as well.

The one thing I would say though, that we in many instances lack, is the ability it would seem to think in those longer term horizons. If the Europeans are literally establishing regulatory frameworks that have phase in periods that run a decade long, and so they are thinking about not just what we do this year and next year and in the next two, three years, but a decade from now.

We don’t see a whole lot of that in Canada. It’s much more short term driven at times by the political situation and otherwise. I do wonder whether or not we face some real risks in sort of our inability. Oftentimes, it would seem to develop solutions with medium term and longer term horizons. It’s too often the case.

I think that this is chasing headlines today and very short term kind of wins when longer term, some of the bigger winners are those that are thinking longer term.

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: Going back to the Canadian context. I’ve sort of come to a belief that the best solutions for a lot of these issues in Canada will be confederate, versus federal or provincial. Europe is a confederation and that could be illustrative of that model and that allows a longer term thinking.

And so I think CIHI is an example of a confederate entity that already has information sharing agreements with provinces, already collects data on a variety of assets and has ability to rapidly scale this. I, I think when you’re in government more directly, you are like said at the whim of what do they care about right now?

And an arm’s length entity can really focus on an issue. I, yeah, I keep pointing to Canadian Blood Services as a model that’s really worked well for this country. We had the biggest public health disaster at the time with the tainted blood scandal and a confederate entity was created and it is, arms length, is outside of government directly, and has world leading expertise. And I think of other confederate entities, and I look at CIHI as a clear example of an entity that can do this.

Katie Bryski: This has been a fantastic conversation and I think a theme that’s really coming through for me is, uh, both and so, you know, that interdisciplinary approach that we started with, I think has seen us through.

Before we close, we have a question that we’ve been asking all of our guests as we celebrate Digital Health Canada’s 50th anniversary. And that question is, in one word, what does digital health mean to you?

Dr. Kumanan Wilson: I would say it means health. I don’t think that the distinction anymore.

Michael Geist: I guess I’d say innovation would be the word that I, that I think of.

I, you know, I think of the evolution of how healthcare is delivered and talk to someone who is, you know, not in the health field. And it seems to me that the shift to digital and the fact is cumin suggests that digital health really is, health comes part and parcel with more innovative ways to deliver services.

Which one would hope ultimately deliver better outcomes.

Katie Bryski: I’d like to thank you both again for your time today. This, again, has been a really rich and wide ranging conversation, and I think we’ve really benefited by bringing in Michael, your expertise from the world of law; Kumanan, oyour expertise from many different parts of the health system, both clinical care policy and the technical side.

And I’m thrilled that we’re able to take our listeners on our journey with us today.

(Musical interlude)

And we’re back, both of us. Welcome back, Shelagh.

Shelagh Maloney: Thank you. I think you know the joys of air travel we’re all familiar with, so, uh, I’m happy to be part of this conversation and, and what a great podcast. So thank you for doing it solo, Katie and, thanks to Kumanan and Michael for being such great guests and having such a great conversation.

I really enjoyed listening to it.

Katie Bryski: It was really great to have their blended perspective of, you know, Michael with law and specifically that broader digital sector experience, and then Kumanan with his policy experience, obviously direct clinical experience, like I just felt like it was such a great example of those intersections that we see in digital health.

Shelagh Maloney: You know, and I think one of the things that struck me as I was listening is the reference to parallels, you know, the COVID vaccine and we don’t manufacture COVID vaccines in Canada. It was a bit of an “aha” moment for us, and I think we’re having one of those same moments as we’re dealing with geopolitical tensions and the AI and platforms that reside outside of Canada, et cetera, and it was really interesting conversation about.

We want people to use our data for AI, even if they aren’t Canadian platforms. But so it was, it was sort of a compromise as it were. What do we do here? What do we do abroad? And do we want it used? But we would rather that we use it on our own, but if we can’t do it on our own, we’d rather somebody use it.

Katie Bryski: Michael said, in this case, half a cake is better than no cake. Even though generally we would prefer to have our cake and eat it too. But no, it’s a good point. Hearkening back to COVID and looking at some of those lessons that we learned then, and what we can apply this time, and I think generally as leaders, that’s a valuable skill, right?

To look at a situation or a scenario and say, okay, where have I seen maybe something similar to this before? What did I learn and how can I either double down on choices that worked well last time or do something different if I want a different outcome.

Shelagh Maloney: In that same vein, the whole Canadian Blood Services example, right?

Is that we had this huge scandal. We learned from it as a nation, we developed this association that’s arms length, that has international expertise. And so really that, again, a parallel to say, here’s what we need to do in Canada. And then Kumanan made a good point about we do have. Here in Canada, they have taken some of this on.

They’ve got that expertise and, and really harking back to our conversation with Dr. Anderson Chuck around, it takes a village and it’s a group effort, so they are happy to lead it, but recognizing everybody meeting to work together to advance the agenda.

Katie Bryski: You know, we’ve talked, I’ve mused, I think, in these segments about – we are a federated health system, but how can that also be a strength?

And I think that maybe that’s one example is it does… force is maybe a strong word, but it forces us to come together in a different way and have those different perspectives and different people around the table who may not otherwise be.

And so I’m glad that we have this space where we can have these conversations with many different types of experts who are all part of the greater health ecosystem. Uh, and I’m excited for our next month’s conversation, but until then, you can find many different resources as always, on the Digital Health Canada website.

You can also register, I believe, still for eHealth? Yes, this is true. Registration is still open?

Shelagh Maloney: Yes, absolutely.

Katie Bryski: Great. Yes. eHealth will be in June in Halifax. If you would like to have some of these great conversations with your peers in person,

Shelagh Maloney: And if you are going to Halifax and I strongly encourage you to attend, book your hotel rooms.

Folks, you heard it here first. They will sell out. There’s apparently a big regatta or something going on in Halifax that same weekend, so it will be a busy time and it’ll be an excellent conference. And yeah, we’ll be doing some live podcasts on site, so looking forward to that as well.

Katie Bryski: And in the meantime, we will see you next month right back 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 convers. Station 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.

We’ll see you next month. Stay connected, get inspired, and be empowered.