Digital Health Standards
Why We Need Digital Health Standards
Digital health standards lay a strong foundation for realizing the full potential of digital health solutions that can help ensure Canadians receive the care they need. These standards provide the technical framework and clinical terminology that enables thousands of healthcare providers to communicate and share health information that is contextual, consistent and unambiguous in meaning.
Digital health standards also support the safe and secure exchange of healthcare information across the continuum of care to facilitate clinical decision support, data analytics, population health management and more. They are integral to achieving structural and semantic interoperability, which is the ability for information to flow seamlessly between different health systems, workflows and solutions using standardized data definitions.
Data Exchange and Terminology Standards in Action
The pan-Canadian Patient Summary Specification (PS-CA) exemplifies how standards work to facilitate the secure sharing of essential patient health data at the point of care. Built on internationally recognized frameworks, such as the International Patient Summary (IPS), HL7, IHE, and ISO, the PS-CA standardizes the terminology and structure used by health information systems across Canada. This ensures that critical data—such as medications, allergies, immunizations, and procedures—can be securely and accurately shared, enhancing communication and interoperability at local, provincial, national, and international levels.
Adopting the PS-CA leads to improved system interoperability, reduced test duplication, fewer medical errors, and better patient outcomes through more coordinated and timely care delivery. This facilitates timely, accurate and seamless exchange of information between digital health solutions.
Access Standards
To facilitate the adoption of health terminology standards, our national FHIR Terminology Server securely stores, maintains, and distributes both international and national terminologies, including value sets, making them easily accessible to digital health solutions and healthcare data providers.
By hosting high-quality international and pan-Canadian terminologies, the server ensures scalability, security, and reliability, while promoting interoperability and semantic consistency across systems. This helps standardize health data using consistent representation and shared meaning of health data across disparate digital health systems.