Ottawa’s health information demands will benefit patients

BY NORM TOLLINSKY

The recent federal-provincial agreement on health-care spending is being hailed as an important step toward the liberation and sharing of personal health information between healthcare providers and patients.

“We’ve now moved out of the arguing phase and into the solutioning phases,” said Will Falk, senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and executive-in-residence at the Rotman School of Management. “There’s real money and intent here, and they’ve agreed they’re going to get things done.”

As part of the funding agreement, Ottawa will require the provinces to annually report their progress on several indicators, including the percentage of health professionals able to share patient health information and the percentage of Canadians able to access it.

“In the U.S., they’ve had greater transparency through a number of programs for a good decade. We know from some of the research they’ve done that patients with access to their information are more engaged with their care and they come to their appointments prepared to have important conversa- tions,” said Dr. Trevor Jamieson, chief medical information officer at Unity Health, formerly St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.

Both Falk and Dr. Jamieson insist that the data be computable or machine readable, and that raises the whole issue of interoperability.

“Five years ago, if we were having this discussion, we would have been looking at a portal,” said Falk. “Pretty clearly though, we’ve moved past the portal stage to talking about open APIs.

“If I’m a patient,” said Dr. Jamieson, “I should be able to pull my information from multiple sources and do basic things with it – like draw a graph. And if you can do that for a patient, then that establishes the inter-

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