Optimizing Canadian Healthcare with the Power of Information 

Canadian healthcare providers have high workloads, long hours, and a substantial risk of burnout. To make matters worse, they do not have the level of automation supporting them that other professions enjoy. Efficiently and effectively leveraging information has become critical in every industry from manufacturing through finance, yet healthcare continues to rely on manual processes in the majority of care settings. 

All aspects of care delivery are dependent on information related to the patient, their conditions, the science backing therapies, and the ongoing patient response to therapy. EMRs (electronic medical records) are only one data source in a heterogeneous environment at every hospital system. As we roll in new approaches such as precision medicine, information flow will increase and the ability to absorb this information manually will diminish. 

The Reality of Healthcare in Canada

This is the reality for many doctors in Canada, as the average Canadian healthcare provider spends about 40 minutes a day searching for healthcare information, which often only represents a portion of the overall relevant data set. Antiquated and siloed proprietary IT systems lack the standardized infrastructure, automation capability, and the intelligence layer needed to optimally work with health information, which adds cognitive load to clinicians. 

Within each province in Canada, healthcare systems use different data standards and systems to store and exchange information. This is fine if the only need is specific and singular information from one source. However, with more advanced and complicated needs, problems will arise as there are no workflows or decision support based on available information across platforms. Furthermore. there is no clear integration with primary care and multi-organization process management. Each province, though committed to providing quality care, has different goals and, as such, different methods to reach those goals.

Canada’s incompatible and divergent healthcare standards make it challenging to access patient data across systems. This leaves patients in the dark about their care plans and next steps. Additionally, the lack of data connectivity creates barriers for clinicians and care teams, weakening collaboration between health teams within and across provinces. On a systemic level, securely accessing, sharing information and collaborating is a burdensome process which compromises quality of care and increases expenditures.

On an organizational level, as well as part of the broader ecosystem, the need to employ a secure and scalable, common standard mechanism for interchanging information is essential. One of the hallmarks of the Canadian landscape is health accessibility in remote locations, which is often limited by all the aforementioned issues and compounded by the lack of digital infrastructure in those underserved areas. 

Adopting an information-first approach allows incongruent healthcare systems to utilize interoperability, leading to a new age of data exchange. We are seeing this model gain traction with the UK NHS (National Health Service), US NIH (National Institutes of Health), ONC (Office of the National Coordinator) and other similar agencies. It is becoming acutely apparent that making information ubiquitously available in a structured and semantically interoperable way is key to changing the game for the healthcare industry.

What Does This Look Like for Canada? 

There is a huge opportunity, regionally and nationally, to drive efficiencies to improve the quality of care, reduce errors, reduce burdens on clinicians, enhance collaboration, encourage healthy behaviours, and for patients to participate in research that is effectively going to improve the well-being of Canadians. In this scenario, the provinces would still have their own goals and jurisdiction, but with wide adoption of modern standards—such as FHIR®—automation, intelligent data exchange, and interoperability would significantly improve across the country. 

Information-powered modernization and transformation reduces human effort and manual data exchange and enables semantic and structural data interoperability. This allows for information from health systems to be exchanged with one another based on a common set of medical terminology and context. It also creates complete longitudinal patient records. 

The Health Data Fabric is a powerful and comprehensive solution that enables interoperability and better patient care at the organizational and regional levels. A Health Data Fabric cleans and houses data with interconnected networks and is fueled by a modern AI-backed rules processing engine. Deployed at the enterprise-level, this platform can easily be scaled nationally and also allows for regional realization.

When a Health Data Fabric is built on composable architecture, it allows for both flexibility and standardization in combining individual components—care gaps analysis, quality measures, resource optimization reports, master data management, and more—as part of the integrated data platform needs for your integrated data platform. So, when a person is sick, anywhere in Canada, their relevant and historical health records are available to the clinical team at the time of their appointment, even when care has to be delivered across multiple sites. For complex patients, coordination and communication among care teams becomes efficient, enabling the next course of action and patient follow-up.

Additionally, when a hospital wants a quality measure analysis, it can leverage a complete clinical reasoning data analysis platform to provide timely analysis. Since FHIR has a much stronger international adoption, when a Canadian needs health services anywhere in the world, their International Patient Summary (IPS) serves as a multi-jurisdiction record to support the best care delivery. These are a few examples of how creating a standardized IT infrastructure can drive automation and start creating value for Canadians. 

From the perspective of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), the data framework has to support coordination, policy, governance, audits, and innovation. Since each province in Canada has its own jurisdiction, an FHIR-powered Health Data Fabric can support customization needs to enable provincial interoperability before scaling nationally, while also providing semantic and structural data interoperability. For example, automated chronic disease detection across populations is a cumbersome process. It requires longitudinal health records, updated family history and trends, and deep research engagement, which is impacted by a combination of things—technology, privacy laws, availability of information, pattern analysis, and clinician and patient awareness.

By having a common set of data models within and across the provinces, EHRs and other IT vendors can focus on common tooling to assess how policy changes impact the behaviours of patients and providers. Common strategies that support clinicians and researchers across the country can similarly unleash the advantages of data assets nationally, resulting in economies of scale that do not require heavy manual, administrative, or operational input. 

Along with everything outlined above, a Health Data Fabric architecture framework provides the foundation for the Internet of Health. The Internet of Health enables better diagnostic and decision making tools for clinicians and better, timelier health services for patients. With truly interoperable data available, we can automate, specialize and incentivize care properly, which in turn expands care delivery without adding administrative burden on the system. Regional, provincial and national organizations looking for data modernization and value creation can maximize the benefits of FHIR by leveraging its multipurpose interoperability functionality to drive automation, enhance efficiency, create a higher quality of care and deliver other tangible ROIs without adding administrative burden.

The Future of Healthcare

The road to interoperability is long, but no one walks it alone. There is plenty of work to be done, and healthcare technology has a lot to catch up on to meet and maybe even surpass other safety-critical, information-dense industries with respect to interoperable systems. The Smile Health Data Fabric is quickly and widely being adopted throughout Canada. Smile is working with various provincial health agencies on major modernization projects that aim to improve intelligent data usage and eliminate data silos throughout their healthcare networks. Smile’s active presence in multiple provinces is a clear sign that the appetite for standardized FHIR infrastructures and robust enterprise-level data exchange platforms is growing within the contemporary landscape of healthcare. 

As the Canadian healthcare system continues towards its data modernization goal, individual agencies, provincial organizations, and national initiatives can start to engage with companies like Smile to create bespoke FHIR strategies that fit their goals and provide better value and #BetterGlobalHealth to Canadians, wherever they are.