The following op-ed was written by Dr. Julio Montaner.
When investigating disease and developing effective management strategies, time is more than money – it is lives saved, cases averted, and pain and suffering pre-vented. That’s why the call from Van-couver-Quilchena MLA Colin Hansen (Vancouver Sun, March 14) to open the provincial health care database to expert researchers and health care scientists throughout B.C. resonated so strongly with me.
There is no doubt that the success of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/ AIDS (BC-CfE) in fighting this devastating epidemic has been driven by the calibre of our staff and our partners and their collective unwavering commitment to improve health outcomes for HIV-infected individuals and pre-vent further infections. However, this would not have been enough.
Our success has also been facilitated by the remarkable data that we have been able to collect and interrogate for more than 20 years. We have generated primary data through our own efforts, and more importantly, we have been able to link these data to multiple other administrative data-bases, giving us access to a wealth of invaluable insights on the impact of our many initiatives.
Few of our achievements would have been possible without access to timely and extensive linkages with multiple relevant databases. Close monitoring and evaluation of the rapidly evolving HIV epidemic in B.C. and the out-comes of our interventions gave the BC-CfE a unique opportunity to stay ahead of events, modify strategies on a real-time basis, implement novel cost-effective strategies and, most importantly, save lives and prevent new HIV infections.