Spotlights Spotlights

While there is work ahead for interoperability in health care, let’s take a moment to celebrate the accomplishments thus far and extend our congratulations to LOINC on their 30-year milestone.

Join us in celebrating World Standards Day and learn more about the digital health standards that Infoway releases, which provide the technical nuts and bolts that drive interoperability in Canadian health care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has concretely demonstrated the impact that social factors can have on health and health equity. The new Social Determinants of Health Working Group on InfoCentral will explore how to incorporate social determinants of health (SDOH) concepts into digital health systems. Recently, the group's leaders joined our podcast to explore SDOH in more depth, and to discuss the new working group.

We invited Dr. Michelle Grinman and Dr. Shauna Tierney to the Digital Health InfoCast, Infoway’s podcast, to discuss hospital at home care and their new InfoCentral community.

The action plan to modernize gender, sex and sexual orientation information practices in Canadian Electronic Health Record Systems was significantly advanced in 2020. New participants welcome to help put it into action this year.

The 2020 agreement between SNOMED International and the International Council of Nurses (ICN) is an opportunity to highlight the clinical work of nursing. Under the agreement, the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) will be incorporated into SNOMED CT, the world’s most comprehensive clinical terminology, with more than 350,000 active concepts, and SNOMED International will manage, produce and release the ICNP on behalf of ICN.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Alana Lane is a certified Health Information Management (HIM) Professional and works as a Program Lead in Classifications and Terminologies at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and is the co-chair of the Health Terminologies Community on InfoCentral.

Each year on October 14, World Standards Day recognizes the collaborative efforts of experts across the globe to develop the standards underpinning our work in digital health. This year’s theme is “Protecting the Planet with Standards.” Andrea MacLean reflects on the importance of interoperability for patients, providers and the planet.

Whether you’re a physician sending diagnostic imaging across the country or a patient checking lab results on a smartphone, it’s essential that different health information systems and devices can talk to each other. This flow of information between systems is interoperability, and it is essential to effective digital health, especially in Canada, where different provinces and territories look after their own systems.

Thank you to all the volunteers that contribute to improving digital health through standards. Read one of Infoway’s spotlights of InfoCentral Standards Community leaders. 

There are a lot of forms in health care, however the data captured is often static — it can't be independently shared or queried. Looking to break down data silos in cancer care, two standandards were leverage, IHE and FHIR, enabling health information to be quickly and easily shared with specialists and others in the circle of care, facilitating better health outcomes.

Historically, EHRs have used "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, but they are distinct (and nonbinary) concepts. As we observe Pride Month in Canada, read about the work being done in InfoCentral's Sex & Gender community to modernize Canada’s sex and gender information practices in digital health.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Marcy Antonio is a PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, completing an interdisciplinary degree that pulls from Health Informatics, Nursing and Public Health with a focus on health equity and digital technologies, and is co-lead of InfoCentral’s Sex and Gender Working Group.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Kelly Davison is a Registered Nurse that has practiced along the continuum of care in two provinces and he is a graduate of University of Victoria’s double degree MN/MSc (Health Informatics) program and the Health Terminology Standards program. Kelly brings this wealth of knowledge and experience to his leadership role in the Sex and Gender working group on InfoCentral.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Grant Gillis and Don Newsham bring decades of health informatics experience to co-lead a community focused on meeting the need for relevant informatics standards for the rapidly growing field of omics, including genomics, proteomics and phenomics data, information and knowledge.

Canadians with mental health issues are struggling to navigate the health system and often don’t know where to begin, resulting in trips to hospital emergency departments or, sadly, doing nothing at all. There is also still a stigma associated with having a mental illness that makes it difficult for them to reach out for help.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Finnie Flores is a Program Lead in Architecture and Standards at Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and is a founding co-lead of the Health Analytics community on InfoCentral and previously was Co-Lead of Coordination of Care.

Celebrate by attending an Oct. 17 webinar highlighting the importance of virtual standards to enable a patient’s ability to self manage care, by reading a message from the IEC, ISO and ITU or by reading one of Infoway’s spotlights of InfoCentral Standards Community leaders. Thank you to all the volunteers that contribute to improving digital health through standards.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Jason Nagels has spent the past decade working with Hospital Diagnostic Imaging Repository Services (HDIRS), a provincial diagnostic imaging repository, and is the current chair of Infoway’s Diagnostic Imaging community (DI), a group exploring imaging topics to accelerate clinical interoperability, such as Foreign Exam Management, Remote Reading and Radiology Synoptic Reporting.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Andy French is a data management professional and the co-chair of the Health Analytics community, a space connecting providers, implementers and vendors working on solutions to enable analytics, both technically and from a business view across jurisdictions.