"Canada needs a national body to study the medical workforce and give us reliable projections and good analysis, because many things in profession are changing. Canada is the only comparable country does not have a national research and analytic capacity in the medical workforce."
-- Dr. Andrew Padmos, CEO, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada
(synopsis of program and link to audio pasted below)
Hearing this really took me off guard, coming from the CEO of an organization I would have thought was performing those analytics.
It seems like an important and challenging case for a citizen open data project. Important because the long-term viability of Canada's healthcare system is everyone's shared responsibility. And challenging because the data involved for performing such analytics are some of the riskiest in terms of privacy issues; and revealing of sensitive regional health & economic disparities. So the data sets would need to be thoroughly cleaned, anonymized, and controlled. (And that assumes that the relevant data sets are already compiled and organized into a collection.)
These risks may be outweighed though by the potential returns of successful analysis through an open data exercise. For example, the web site Kaggle runs very successful analytics competitions in which hundreds of teams compete to solve exactly these kinds of problems. The kinds of answers generated might be along the lines of: guiding what medical specialities are taught to current students; predicting what/where are the needs of Canada's aging populations; designing policy to effectively incentivize doctors to take less desirable posts.
Synopsis of CBC episode:
There are more than 4 million Canadians who can't find a family doctor. Anecdotally, we know lots of people wait months to see a specialist. And yet unemployment rates are as high as 16% for some recently-graduated medical specialists. Medical students say it is time to change the system, they want access to better data so they know which careers to pursue and where they are wanted and needed.
Locked
