I expect the outcome will be that we'll need an extension to convey the specific "gender" values needed to meet various use-cases and policy/legislative requirements. It would certainly be nice if we could standardize on a relatively small set of extensions with consistent value sets across the country.

Infoway received a question from an implementer asking if there were any plans to reflect Transgender Male and Female in DIS specifications.

At this point in time, Infoway has not received any formal requests to make any updates to this value set.

On the HL7 community meeting on Tuesday, the community noted the FHIR recommendations that can be found here: https://build.fhir.org/patient.html for further information.


It should be noted that on June 19, 2017, the Federal government passed bill C-16 that deals with gender identify and expression and more information about that bill can be found here.

(https://lop.parl.ca/About/Parliament/LegislativeSummaries/bills_ls.asp?Language=E&ls=c16&Parl=42&Ses=1&source=library_prb).

I did chat this morning with Andrew Drummond (Senior Information Management Policy Advisor, Information Management Strategy and Policy Branch, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care), who is doing some policy related work on this for Ontario and he stated that all provinces and territories are currently grappling with how to collect gender data.

Recently Ontario announced that it is changing the way it displays sex and gender information on health cards and driver's licences. (https://news.ontario.ca/mgs/en/2016/06/gender-on-health-cards-and-drivers-licences.html).

In my chat with Andrew, he believes (and personally I agree) that until policy has been set, it is likely premature to make any formal changes to the standard. Andrew explained that everyone is still trying to work out the best way to collect and standardize this information. This work is still a work in progress and nothing has been finalized. Andrew is happy to discuss at a future HL7 meeting if there is interest from the community.

Thank you.

Regards,

Andrea