Spotlights Spotlights

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.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Dr. Diane Gutiw is Vice President of Analytics at CGI and was a founding co-chair of the Health Analytics community on InfoCentral. Prior to that, she served as co-lead of InfoCentral’s Coordination of Care community. Infoway connected with Dr. Gutiw to thank her for her years of service to the InfoCentral communities and to learn more about her thoughts on the impact these communities have had on digital health innovation in Canada.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Derek Ritz consults on strategy, digital health enterprise architecture, e-health standards, and national-scale digital health infrastructure implementation and adoption, plus he serves as leader of InfoCentral's IHE community. Learn more about Derek and how digital health solutions can help improve health outcomes across Canada.

Stepping into the Spotlight: Dr. Francis Lau is a Professor in the School of Health Information Science at the University of Victoria and serves as co-leader of InfoCentral's Health Terminologies community. Learn more about Dr. Lau and how digital health solutions can help Canadians lead healthier lives.

As Canadians, we’re proud of our health care system – it saves lives. For 50 years it’s stood for equality and compassion, but Canada is no longer a world leader in health care. We’re in the innovation age, but our health care has not kept up.

With the rising popularity of the FHIR standard, some have begun to wonder what role there is for IHE. IHE's role is to realize that value by taking innovations to scale and operationalizing the Interoperable Healthcare Ecosystem.

Infoway’s ACCESS Health program will empower Canadians to better manage their health and strengthen their care teams through digitally-enabled care.

Celebrate by reading a message form the IEC, ISO and ITU; and/or by attending an Oct. 15 webinar highlighting the role standards play in supporting innovative solutions within mental health and addictions. Thank you to all the volunteers that contribute to improving digital health through standards.

For as long as I have been working in health care, I have been hearing, reading and/or discussing the need for disparate IT and health care solutions to talk to each other — to communicate and share information.

If you or your team are building health solutions on the FHIR data standard but have yet to join the FHIR Implementations working group, its new work stream makes today an even more exciting time to do so.

To best utilize the capabilities of FHIR^®, and to achieve the broadest possible scaling and interoperability of digital health applications, Canada Health Infoway is engaging with the Canadian health interoperability community to promote and support the strategic use of FHIR.

Reflecting on three positive actions that will result in progress across all of Canada for sharing of patient data.