Doctors and patients join industry to promote medtech in Canada

By Peter Rixon, Clinica
Published Online: 14/10/2008 http://www.pjbpubs.com/clinica/index.htm

MEDEC, Canada’s medical technology association, has launched a campaign to highlight how medical technology can revitalise people’s lives and stem rising healthcare costs.

The Toronto-based association has drafted in an array of patients and doctors to illustrate how medical devices can have a positive impact on the lives of ordinary Canadians.

The patient stories have been superbly picked to highlight the strength of medtech solutions. One Calgary resident, Patrick Shouldice, recalls how he collapsed on a golf course, while on holiday in Arizona, US. A remote monitoring system allowed staff at Foothills Arrhythmia Clinic in Calgary to evaluate data from his implanted device and conclude that he would not need to go to hospital, or return to Canada, but could carry on golfing.

In a peculiarly Canadian incident, another patient, John Livey, recalls his recovery from playing recreational ice hockey after suffering from atrial fibrillation. After a six-hour procedure and two days of hospitalisation, Mr Livey was already looking forward to going back to work, as chief administrative officer of Markham, “Canada’s high-tech capital”, although his return to the ice rink was not as quick.

The stories serve well to illustrate MEDECs main point: that medtech can deliver the goals of federal and provincial governments in terms of decreasing wait times, increasing patient access, reducing healthcare costs, transforming healthcare delivery as well as treating an ever-increasing population.

“I know that all of my colleagues, when you sit in the doctors’ lounge, are complaining about the same things: longer wait times and not enough operating times,” Dr David Psutka, of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, told Clinica.

Dr Psutka and colleague Dr Gerald Baker are among the physicians participating in the MEDEC campaign, highlighting how they see the situation at clinic-level. Dr Psutka helps patients who suffer from temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders, where the function of the joint that connects the jaw to the skull can be impaired.

Patients, who have often had multiple surgeries to try to ease the discomfort they feel from TMJ, turn to Dr Psutka’s and Dr Baker’s clinic for prosthetic replacements. “If patients wind up in the downward spiral of severe arthritic changes to their TMJ that ultimately cause them to have a major surgical intervention, the question is how many operations do you want them to have?”, Dr Psutka asks. “If you can do one operation instead of 10, there’s got to be a benefit there.”

Doctors who have been patients themselves are also featured in the MEDEC campaign. Ontario anaesthesiologist Dr Paul Slavchenko joyfully recalls how hip arthroplasty means he no longer has a problem “carrying my four-year-old daughter on my shoulders going back and forth to the library” anymore.

The MEDEC campaign is timely, dovetailing with the publication of a study by the Fraser Institute, an independent research body, that has found Canada to be a “late adopter of technology” compared to other OECD countries.

The same institute reported on October 7 that the average wait time for Canadians seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment dropped to 17.3 weeks in 2008 from 18.3 weeks in 2007. “Despite the small improvement, many Canadians are still waiting 121 days or more for necessary medical treatment. Is this something we should be proud of? Absolutely not,” Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute Director of Health System Performance Studies, said.