New Model, New Agency, New Money
The Panel recommends two key enabling actions to accelerate and support innovations that Canada needs to ensure that the healthcare system is meeting Canadian’s needs:
- Establish a new Healthcare Innovation Fund as a dedicated catalytic fund that would support high-impact initiatives that will effect sustainable and systemic changes in the delivery of health services. The Fund’s allocations will be made based on rigorous adjudication against transparent specifications and commitments by partners to demonstrate their success and return on the investment.
The Fund will support initiatives grouped under the following 5 priority themes:
- Patient engagement and empowerment
- Health system integration with workforce modernization
- Technological transformation via digital health and precision medicine
- Better value from procurement, reimbursement and regulation
- Industry as an economic driver and innovation catalyst
- Create a Healthcare Innovation Agency of Canada to set the long-term vision for the healthcare system and healthcare innovation goals. It would be an arm’s length organization funded by the federal government with a corporate structure that provides robust, independent oversight and direction to the Fund and its projects. It would catalyze and coordinate collaboration with the pan-Canadian health agencies and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research to ensure alignment of activities. The funds and staff from the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvements and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute would be shifted to this new agency.
The panel chose not to recommend any changes to the current plans for health transfers but instead due to the scope and scale of the problems of Canada’s lagging healthcare system, the panel recommended both the new fund and the agency as two key enabling actions needed to initiate and scale-up improvements in healthcare across Canada – the system-wide transformation that CARP has been calling for. Despite the federal government’s silence upon the release of the report, CARP and many other Canadians, who want to see healthcare improved to serve its citizens, welcome the Panel’s recommendations and urges the federal government to take leadership and improve healthcare for Canadians by putting the panel’s recommendations into action.
Read the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation’s report “Unleashing Innovation: Excellent Healthcare for Canada”
Read CARP’s Healthcare Citizen submission to the Advisory Panel on Healthcare Innovation
