The federal Liberals are taking action to streamline and ensure Health data A new bill imposing new rules for technology vendors is making its way across jurisdictions.
Sanitation Committee Mark Holland The legislation was introduced in the House of Commons on Thursday morning.
The bill would require vendors to ensure that the health information technology they license, sell, or provide as a service is interoperable.
This means that patients and healthcare providers will be able to access data completely securely and exchange data with other systems, such as those used in other hospitals or jurisdictions.
The bill is intended to fill a gap in provinces and territories that have not yet enacted similar regulations.
It also prohibits data blocking, or any action that prevents, hinders or interferes with a user’s access to their own health data or its transmission to another system.
Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposed a new 10-year health-care agreement to the provinces and territories in response to requests from jurisdictions that said they were facing an emergency shortage of health-care workers and massive medical backlogs.
In exchange for about $17.3 billion in new health-care funding from the federal government through the Canada Health Transfer, Trudeau is requiring provinces to share comparable data and digitize Canadians’ health information so it can be more easily accessed and shared between hospitals, clinics and jurisdictions.
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The federal government believes that better comparable health data is an important component to ensuring that new funds are actually used to improve the health of Canadians.
As of March of this year, all provinces and territories had signed the agreement.
The Canada Health Information Highway established a federal and provincial program to make personal health records and information more accessible to patients and clinicians, which can then be used to measure the health of populations and systems as a whole.
The organization projects that by making patient information and health data more accessible, the healthcare system will save hundreds of millions of dollars and doctors could save millions of hours.
The program is still in its early stages, with some provinces further along in technology upgrades than others.
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