Government Operations committee  From a Health Canada perspective, most of the data we consume comes from either our partners or the different levels of government. As a health regulator, we produce a certain level of data and the other data is published directly by the provinces or through our partner at the ta

Government Operations committee  The data we publish is only aggregated data. We don't publish any individual-level data on the sites, so right away we don't have to really deal with the anonymization aspects of it. But of course privacy, security, and confidentiality are always of utmost concern to us. As the i

Government Operations committee  Absolutely.

Government Operations committee  I agree with the points my colleagues made, so I won't repeat them. However, I will say we definitely have a challenge as far as data publication and official languages are concerned. Internally, the datasets contain text that our researchers and scientists use and sometimes t

Government Operations committee  The areas of high value were identified, as you know, on the G-8 annex, the G-8 open data agreement annex. So as a result, when these got published, we actually sought out the different program areas within our organization to find out which data sets they had available and what

Government Operations committee  An example would be with respect to the medical device active licence listing, for instance. It's an area that is, however, highly dynamic and we believe that it could be better published through an API, an application programming interface, because publishing any of this infor

Government Operations committee  The information is reported from multiple sources. It may be reported from people taking drugs. It may be reported from pharmacists or from medical doctors. It comes from all sources. It's aggregated and then it's published.

Government Operations committee  I simply talked about the need to look at sources of data more horizontally. We know that things like the weather have impact on the health of Canadians. Whether you live up north or in other regions of the country, we see different patterns from a health perspective. So we see t

Government Operations committee  We do routinely publish the information and the negative effects of drugs on our website through the Canada vigilance program. What we publish or don't publish isn't under pressure of industry or any other pharmaceutical organizations or anything like that. It's just information

Government Operations committee  On our end, we can really see the benefits of a horizontal approach. Certainly from our perspective, a common approach and standards across the board are called for. As well, multi-level information-sharing agreements that would contain clear terms and conditions in line with th

Government Operations committee  For us at Health Canada, there are some data sets right now that are duplicated. They are typically the older ones. However, as we move forward towards renewing our websites, towards a healthy Canadian website, we will focus our effort and put the data on the data.gc.ca website a

Government Operations committee  The answer is no for me too.

Government Operations committee  Good morning and thank you, Mr. Chair. I am Guylaine Montplaisir, the chief information officer for Health Canada. It is a great privilege for me to be here today. I want to thank you for the opportunity to present the Health Canada approach and progress to date with open data.