Thank you. Good morning.
On behalf of the Canadian Institute for Health Information, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee.
For the last 20 years, CIHI, as we're known, has played a unique role in Canada's health sector. As a government-funded but independent not-for-profit organization that provides essential information on our health system and the health of Canadians, our vision is simple: better data, better decisions, healthier Canadians.
Our mandate is to lead the development and maintenance of comprehensive and integrated health information that enables sound policy and effective health system management. Our strategic plan commits us to improving the comprehensiveness, quality, and availability of our data to support population health and health system decision making and to ensure its effective use. With our data access strategy, we ensure that our data is accessible to users through a number of ways in a timely manner.
CIHI is a data custodian for a wide variety of data on different aspects of the health system, including health services, quality of care, health expenditures, health care providers, and patient safety. Since our inception, and with input from our many stakeholders across the country, we have helped improve the depth and breadth of Canada's health data by developing information standards that allow every jurisdiction in the country to understand, compare, and use health data effectively; building and maintaining 28 pan-Canadian databases that enable jurisdictions to compare data; producing analyses on health and health care in Canada that are relevant, timely, and actionable; and increasing the understanding and use of data through education, reporting tools, and strategies.
Although we play an integral role in providing data and analyses to policy-makers in Canada's health system, we are neutral and objective in fulfilling our mandate. We neither create nor take positions on policy. We are funded by federal, provincial, and territorial governments and governed by a 15-member board of directors that links federal, provincial, and territorial governments with non-governmental health groups.
We work with a broad range of health organizations and partners across the country, providing data and information to help them fulfill their mandates. Our partners include provincial and territorial ministries of health that voluntarily submit data to us through data-sharing agreements, and other organizations such as Statistics Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, Accreditation Canada, Canada Health Infoway, and Health Canada, with whom we collaborate on many health information initiatives.
Data quality and standards are fundamental to our work. Through our internationally recognized data quality program, we apply rigour to all data collection, analyses, and reporting activities. An integral part of data quality is developing and maintaining standards and working with our stakeholders. We take a lead role in developing and implementing national standards to ensure the consistency and accuracy of our data for use in pan-Canadian comparable reporting.
Much of CIHI's data is sensitive health information. As custodians of this data, we are committed to protecting the privacy of Canadians and take this role very seriously. We do this through a comprehensive information privacy and security program. As a prescribed entity under Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act, CIHI is one of only four organizations in Ontario authorized to collect, use, and disclose personal health information for the purposes outlined in the act. We are also subject to oversight by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, and our privacy practices and procedures are reviewed and approved every three years.
As we are all aware, open data generally is about turning the data of government, such as data on weather or climate, natural resources, processing times for immigration applications, things that my colleagues have mentioned, outward for others to use to improve transparency and to promote economic activity. Some data, such as the data CIHI holds, in many instances contains personal health information, and we need to safeguard that data and release it in ways that are appropriate. For example, we need to ensure that sufficient protections are in place to prevent re-identification of an individual, residual disclosure of their health conditions, or other sensitive information. Quite frankly, CIHI's existence depends on us holding up that expectation and requirement.
CIHI strives to make our rich public resource of administrative data from provincial and territorial health systems available and accessible to stakeholders in a way that ensures privacy and security. Just one of the ways we uphold those protections is by following a series of policies and procedures whenever someone requests access to a CIHI data set. We employ staff highly trained in data anonymization and other techniques for this purpose, and in some cases, hire other experts to advise us. This is how we were able to place two sample files of our acute care data set into post-secondary libraries in Canada last year.
Similar to the open data initiative, we have a multi-year strategy under way to make the data we hold more accessible to our stakeholders through a wide range of means such as OurHealthSystem.ca, which is a website designed to help Canadians understand how well their health system is performing. It features 15 indicators exploring five areas of performance that Canadians told us were most important to them.
Public reporting is a key part of our health system performance agenda. As part of this three-year package of work, we are developing a number of interactive tools featuring performance indicators for health regions, acute care hospitals, and long-term care homes. These tools will be publicly available on our website. The next release in the fall will provide cascading performance measurement reports for health regions and facility executives. Users will be able to export data on any of the 43 indicators available directly into Excel spreadsheets.
Quick stats, another of our products, is a series of free, static, and interactive data tables and supporting documentation about the health care system that is also available to the public through our website. They provide descriptive information for a range of purposes and are used by students, advocacy groups, media, and the broader public. The patient cost estimator, which looks at the cost of particular hospital procedures, and our “wait times for priority procedures” tool are interactive tools also freely available on our website that visually present complex data in a way that is easier for the user to understand.
Our analytical publications contain actual information on important topics for policy-makers, health care leaders, and the public. These products are enabled by the data we hold and the robust methodologies we use and maintain. Some of our recent publications focused on topics such as compromised wounds in Canada, drug use among seniors on public drug programs, adverse drug-related hospitalizations among seniors, bariatric surgery in Canada, measuring the level and determinants of health system efficiency in Canada, and end-of-life hospital care for cancer patients.
We also have a series of annual reports such as “National Health Expenditure Trends”, “Regulated Nurses: Canadian Trends”, some supply and payment information for physicians, and a comprehensive report on end-stage organ failure in Canada.
Finally, if the information someone is seeking is not available through any of the products mentioned so far, researchers, decision-makers, health managers, media, and the public can request information from one or more of CIHI's databases. Requests that are complex and require more work are completed on a cost-recovery basis.
In summary, CIHI operates in a manner that aligns well with what open data is trying to achieve for government. We make a considerable amount of data publicly available and have strategies in place to make even more data available in the future. Given our role as a custodian of sensitive health information, however, it's very important we strike the right balance between accessibility and the protection of personal health information. We continue to work with our federal, provincial, and territorial partners to achieve that.
I thank you for the opportunity to address the committee. Along with my colleague, Michael Hunt, I'd be pleased to answer any questions you may have.