Ottawa asked the provinces and territories to modernize Canadians’ access to their electronic health information with “standardized health data and digital tools.” Bilateral negotiation will define the details of these digital aspirations. [...] The challenge is human, not technical, and traces back decades to the health sector’s mistaken decision to design health information around individual services. [...] Instead, Canadians should have the power to aggregate and then share their information with the tools that will help them most, in much the same way as they might download disparate financial transactions and share them with one of many budgeting or planning tools. [...] It is the lack of a common set of principles around access, consent, security, data-sharing and interoperability that has caused the current fragmentation of Canadians’ data – not the absence of a monopoly vendor or of shared digital infrastructure. [...] And the information needs to be useful (i.e., computable and sharable), not simply a chronological ledger on a website.
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