Auditor general launches probe into health care
Alberta’s auditor general is going to try to fix what ails health care.
Merwan Saher is launching a comprehensive review of his office’s past audits of health-care programs to see if he can identify the fundamental problems in the Alberta medical system and recommend a way to finally fix them.
“We don’t want to do a big, new audit,” he said Friday. “We want to look at the audits we’ve already done and use the findings we already have and the recommendations we’ve already made.”
Saher hopes to report findings that will be “profoundly useful” by February 2016.
“It’s not for us to specify how things should be,” Saher said in an interview. “We’re entitled to look at the way things are and express a view on whether or not the way things are might be an impediment to the best possible health care, in terms of quality and at the best cost.”
The review was welcomed by Alberta Health. Department spokesman Cameron Traynor said Health Minister Sarah Hoffman is always interested in working with the au- ditor general.
“Our priority is to ensure Albertans get the best possible care and are receiving value for their health dollars,” Traynor said.
Health care is the single-biggest expenditure in the provincial budget, costing more than $19 billion in this fiscal year.
Provincial per-capita health expenditures were projected to be 19 per cent above the national average last year, at $4,699 spent per person in Alberta — topped only by spending in Newfoundland and Labrador.
At the heart of the auditor general’s review will be an examination of the roles and responsibilities of the Health Ministry and Alberta Health Services (AHS), Saher said.
“Does Alberta Health Services have a clearly defined mandate and responsibility separate from that of the Department of Health,” he asked the all-party public accounts committee Wednesday. “Is it truly the agent in control of health-care service delivery in this province? Yes or no?”
Saher told the committee the new review is broader than previous audits and would encompass all aspects of the health system, including primary care delivery, mental health, chronic disease management and acute care.
The auditor told the committee he believes information technology and the systems being used with respect to physician compensation are at the centre of the problem. He said it’s not so much the technology, but how it’s shared.
Assistant auditor general Doug Wylie told the legislature committee that effective implementation of a single health program like chronic disease management could have a major impact on hospital emergency room wait times.
He noted that for the 2013 fiscal year alone, 27 per cent of all emergency room visits related to the treatment of chronic diseases.
“Visualize, if you would, a hospital emergency room. It’s full. Every seat is occupied by someone waiting to be seen,” Wylie said. “Now remove 27 per cent of those patients from that waiting room. This is something that may be achievable with effective chronic disease management.”
Saher said Friday the health system needs to be patient-centred and it must make available to anyone caring for a patient the information of all previous care that has been provided.