Take us through the vital story.

The heart and the core insight and focus of our work is that healthcare does not use data very well.

We don't connect data across our healthcare organizations, and we don't use it to inform good decisions, to develop solutions that can improve the way healthcare is delivered, and to use it to enable large-scale cutting-edge research and innovation.

And so we've been working for about 10 years in Ontario on a hospital research network that we named Gemini before Google showed up on the AI scene with their Gemini model.

And that connects hospital data now from about 45 hospitals, that's about 60 to 70% of the patients in Ontario, and makes that available for all of those different applications, quality measurement, research, innovation in healthcare.

And what Vital is doing is taking the work that we've built with Gemini and really accelerating it and scaling it larger.

So essentially saying, we can connect hospital data at large scale across Canada and and we can make it much more timely and make that available so that we can support research and innovation to bring new solutions, new technologies, new investments into healthcare.

That brings us

And my question, of course, is whether this data is identifiable or is it de-identified? What form is this data when it gets dumped into the research pool that you're analyzing at Gemini?

When we think about privacy risk, we try to think about layers of privacy protection.

So part of it involves thinking about how we can minimize risk by reducing identifiable information within the dataset.

And your office has been really helpful in, in leading and putting out some advice and guidance on how we can think about this.

So we follow a framework called the Five Safes framework.

The first safe is to make sure that your data are as safe as possible.

And so the way we do that is we receive data from hospitals that do contain patient identifiers, things like health insurance number.

I was wondering if you can give us a couple of concrete examples of what the benefits are of a project like this.