With a bill that imposes new regulations on technology providers, the Liberals want to streamline and secure the handling of health data in all jurisdictions at the federal level.
Health Minister Mark Holland introduced the bill in the House of Commons on Thursday morning.
The bill would require providers to ensure that the health information technology they license, sell, or provide as a service is interoperable.
This means that patients and healthcare professionals can fully and securely access the data and share it with other systems – for example, systems used in another hospital or jurisdiction.
The bill is intended to close gaps in provinces and territories where similar provisions do not yet exist.
Data blocking or any practice that would prevent, hinder or impair a user’s access to his or her own health data or its transfer to another system would also be prohibited.
Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered the provinces and territories a new 10-year health care agreement in response to requests from some jurisdictions facing acute shortages of health workers and massive backlogs in health care delivery.
In exchange for an estimated $17.3 billion in new health funding from the federal government through the Canada Health Transfer, Trudeau called on provinces to share comparable data and digitize Canadians’ health information so it can be more easily accessed and shared between hospitals, clinics and jurisdictions.
The Canadian federal government argues that more comparable health data is important to ensure that the new funds are actually used to improve health care for Canadians.
All provinces and territories have signed the agreement since March of this year.
Canada Health Infoway has developed a federal and provincial plan to make individual health records and information more easily accessible to patients and physicians so that they can be used to measure the health of the population and the system as a whole.
The group estimates that healthcare systems could save hundreds of millions of dollars and doctors could work millions of hours if patient information and health data were made more easily accessible.
The plan is still in its very early stages and some provinces are more advanced in modernizing their technology than others.
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