Released shortly before the holiday shuffle—and subsequently missed by most people—the Ontario Health Innovation Council (OHIC) Catalyst report lays out six recommendations the province should follow to become a innovative healthcare entity.
The goal of the report's authors was to find ways to improve the quality, speed and delivery of Ontario's healthcare services while also finding ways to transform the province into a bastion of medical innovation.
The most interesting recommendation is the third one, which suggests that the province create a fund for made-in-Ontario technologies. The proposed four year, $20-million fund should be used to help speed the adoption of technologies that are developed within Ontario's borders, says the report's authors.
Another of their recommendations calls for the province to create an office for the “Chief Health Innovation Strategist,” who, if the government goes through with the appointment, will be responsible for identifying the province's most pressing medical needs and aligning the medtech sector's efforts to develop solutions for those needs.
Following the release of the report, MaRS published a statement endorsing the report's recommendations. “We believe that implementing these recommendations will position Ontario as a global health innovation powerhouse, while improving citizen health, and growing Canada’s new health economy,” said Dr. Ilse Treurnicht in the organization's press release.
The full report can be read
here.
Source: Ontario Health Innovation Council.