CanPath partners with CIHI to enable the sharing of important health data to offer comprehensive insights into Canadians’ health trends and outcomes over time.

The Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health (CanPath) and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) are partnering to make a difference in how researchers can assess the health of Canadians.

On September 23, 2024, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and CanPath hosted a celebration to mark this collaboration. The collaboration will integrate CIHI’s health services data—including hospital stays, emergency department visits, and stays in long-term care—with CanPath’s genomic, health, and lifestyle data to offer better insights into health trends and outcomes over time.

“By partnering with CIHI, we are creating a comprehensive, unique data set,” says Prof. Philip Awadalla, National Scientific Director at CanPath. “A researcher or partner will only have to go to one institution rather than multiple sources to access health services data linked to existing CanPath data.”

Currently, CanPath holds the health information of 1% (or 330,000) of people living in Canada who self-report through the study. Most of these participants consented to having CanPath link this data with data held by CIHI – that is, information about their interactions with health systems, such as the type of visit, or clinical information, such as diagnoses or procedures. In cases where this consent was provided, a study participant’s genomic, health and lifestyle data will be connected with their health service records.

“This is all built on a foundation of privacy and security,” says Steve O’Reilly, Executive Director of Federal Relations at CIHI. “I’m actually one of the 330,000 campaign volunteers who have agreed to have my data used and linked, and I’m very excited that this partnership is here.”

“It is time to figure out how to do this better, whether it be looking at the social determinants of health, understanding how we can intervene in genetics and genomics, understanding what we can do to improve health and healthcare,” says Prof. Adalsteinn Brown, Dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the scientific home of the CanPath National Coordinating Centre. “This linkage actually allows us to bring all of that together.”

CanPath and CIHI are not alone in this endeavour to make more complete data available. For instance, CanPath and the Health Data Research Network Canada (HDRN Canada) formed a partnership in August 2020 that is working towards enabling linkage between CanPath data and administrative health data held at provincial data centres. Organizations like CanPath, CIHI, and HDRN Canada are working together to simplify access to linkable multi-jurisdictional data.

With this immense linkage activity, researchers will be able to efficiently and securely access a ready-made dataset that would otherwise take them a year or more to bring together.

“One of the great benefits of this linkage is its timeliness,” says Prof. Victoria Kirsh, National Scientific Coordinator at CanPath and Assistant Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “Instead of waiting years for new questionnaires or additional data, we have annual updates that will allow us to keep a finger on the pulse and conduct both immediate and impactful research.”

“CIHI’s partnership with CanPath allows us to progress our mandate of delivering comparable and actionable information to accelerate healthcare improvements,” says Brent Diverty, Vice President of Data Strategies and Statistics.  “CIHI understands that contributing the health services data for participants of the CanPath study will create a more comprehensive look at how Canadians interact with our health systems and, over time, increase the types of research questions that can be answered, ultimately improving the health of Canadians.”

Jordan Hunt, Data Request Services Manager at CIHI, underscored the unique value of the newly linked dataset created through the partnership: “This is a really exciting, unique linked dataset. CIHI [collects] information about an individual’s interactions with the healthcare system, whether they visited the hospital, a doctor, or the medication they’ve taken.”

“Combining that with CanPath’s information on their genomics, their health, their behaviours, and the environments they live in gives us a really exciting opportunity to look at the relationships between these factors and how they impact the population.”

Soban Arshad, Research Partnerships Officer at the University of Toronto’s Innovations & Partnerships Office, emphasized the significance of the CanPath-CIHI partnerships for advancing research and fostering innovation: “It’s exciting to see these linkages come together at both the national and regional levels through our collaboration with CIHI.”

“This partnership gives us access to data we previously didn’t have, which will open the door for researchers to conduct new types of analysis and explore innovative ideas. It’s also great that the University of Toronto is representing CanPath in this effort, highlighting the university’s role as a leader in cutting-edge research in the field.”

The potential impact of this partnership is immense. Dr. Craig Earle, Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, adds, “It’s really made our hearts grow to see how CanPath has become a world-class research platform.”

He describes how the data linkage is part of CanPath’s evolution into a world-class research platform. “As a health services researcher myself, I know the importance of being able to bring information on social determinants of health and disease risk factors together with information with interactions with the health care system to get insights,” he says.

This collaboration is a significant step forward in health data integration. “It’s our mission to be a longitudinal health laboratory,” says Awadalla, “and this finally aligns CanPath with other initiatives that are happening internationally, such as major programs like the UK Biobank, and it also allows us to fully utilize the Canadian public health system.”

Dr. Laszlo Radvanyi, President and Scientific Director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, sees the potential of CanPath in developing early cancer detection tools and improving healthcare for Canadians. “It’s a huge advantage for Canadians to have CanPath,” he says.

With the potential to revolutionize health research and improve outcomes, this collaboration marks a new chapter in Canada’s efforts to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our time.

About CanPath:

The Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health (CanPath) is Canada’s largest population health study and a national platform for health research. Comprised of more than 330,000 volunteer participants, CanPath is a unique platform that allows scientists to investigate how genetics, environment, lifestyle, and behaviour interact and contribute to developing chronic disease and cancer. CanPath is jointly hosted by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health with national funding from the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer. To learn more, visit www.canpath.ca.

About CIHI:

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing essential health information to all Canadians. CIHI works closely with federal, provincial and territorial partners and stakeholders throughout Canada to gather, package and disseminate information to inform policy, management, care and research, leading to better and more equitable health outcomes for all Canadians.

CIHI is a member of the Health Data Research Network (HDRN) Canada. HDRN Canada is a pan-Canadian network of provincial, territorial and pan-Canadian health data organizations supporting transformative and world-leading multi-regional health data use.

Health information has become one of society’s most valuable public goods. For 30 years, CIHI has set the pace on data privacy, security, accessibility and innovation to improve Canada’s health systems.    

CIHI: Better data. Better decisions. Healthier Canadians.

For more information or to arrange a media interview, please contact:

Megan Fleming
Communications & Knowledge Translation Officer
Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health (CanPath)
info@canpath.ca