recently had the chance to attend the Health Data for All Conference. This conference was a powerful session with many speakers who were passionate about quality improvement in healthcare.
One of the sessions featured speaker Teri Price, who showed a trailer for the 30-minute short film “Falling Through the Cracks,” which explores her brother’s battle with testicular cancer and highlights the gaps in the healthcare system.
These gaps have been well documented; in some cases, referrals are not followed up on, and data is not captured between healthcare organizations. At a time when faxes are still used, and patients are constantly asked to recount medical details that may or may not be accurate, this underscores the importance of reintroducing Bill S-5, the Connected Care for Canadians Act.
This bill was reintroduced on February 4, 2026, as legislation that requires health information systems to communicate across the country and share critical data by mandating that health information technology vendors adopt specific standards across Canada.
Being able to share health data across systems (interoperability) cannot only help to reduce duplication of medical tests and costs (Canada Health Infoway estimates there are around $2.4 billion of inefficiencies annually, which could be addressed by interoperability). Connecting health information can also help to reduce the amount of data entry that clinicians are faced with daily, and in some cases, it is leading to physician burnout. Clinicians can focus on their patients instead of a screen.
Although there are significant benefits if we can get interoperability right in this country in terms of better quality data and cost savings, the biggest impact will be for improving patient outcomes…
Aidan Deschamps, a 10-month-old baby, was screened for Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) by the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, just six days before Aidan was born. He is the first baby in Canada with the disorder identified through Ontario’s Newborn Screening program.
Ontario’s Newborn Screening is done through a heel-prick test shortly after babies are born, and infants can be diagnosed within days of birth. As a result of the work that Newborn Screening does in collaboration with other genetic testing labs and the interoperability of these healthcare systems, the Newborn Screening program was able to reach out to the Deschamps’s family ten days after Aiden was born. With the interoperability between these healthcare systems, clinicians were able to rapidly identify a rare genetic disease and make a difference for this family.
Stories like these are just the tip of the iceberg of the benefits that can come from fully interoperable healthcare systems across the country. I hope this bill is passed, as this will be a significant milestone in driving quality improvement in our healthcare system.
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