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In an interview with the National Post a few days after winning the Tory leadership, Ford at first said the health budget would stay intact if he was premier. “I’m not going to reduce it. I’m going to make sure we drive more efficiencies with the money we have.”

So would that mean exempting health from the four-per-cent reduction?

“No,” he then said. “We’re going to make sure we find savings and increase efficiencies.”

Ford has also said that one of his chief goals would be to curb wait times and alleviate overcrowding in emergency departments, the latter regularly generating stories of “hallway medicine.”

In finding efficiencies, Humber River Hospital would be used as a template, he said in that interview.

He turned an under-performing hospital into one of the most advanced in North America

Performance measurements kept by the province suggest the hospital is doing well, if not spectacularly so. Humber River’s emergency-department wait times are slightly above the provincial average; it has one of the lowest rates of the super-bugs MRSA and VRE in Ontario and an average rate of C. difficile; the wait for CT scans is below the provincial mean, and for knee-replacement surgery well below.

Jacobs suggested its digital infrastructure also provides a seamless flow of medical information — in a health-care system where electronic-records programs are often unable to communicate even across the city of Toronto.

Humber River and its efforts to improve the movement of health data are well regarded, said Tom Doyle, director of McMaster University’s e-health graduate program.

“It’s at the forefront of Canadian health care,” he said.

Still, the Conservatives’ revamped election platform has yet to be unveiled, and the party did not make Devlin available for an interview that might have shed some light on its approach to healthcare — leaving it unclear at this point how Ford would both fix what he says ails the system and cut billions of dollars in spending.

• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TomblackwellNP