Standards

As a national organization, we believe pan-Canadian standards are the cornerstone of high-quality, meaningful health information.

National standards

Working with our stakeholders, we take a lead role in developing and implementing national standards to enhance the consistency and accuracy of Canadian health care information. For example, working with jurisdictions and Canada Health Infoway, we developed and released

• A pan-Canadian content standard for primary health care (PHC) electronic medical records (2011)

The standards used in each of CIHI’s data holdings form part of that data holding’s metadata.

Further information can be found about the following standards:

• Case mix systems use CIHI’s data to categorize patients with similar clinical characteristics and resource use into groups for analysis so health care organizations can better plan and manage their services.
• Classification and coding at CIHI help health care professionals maintain, understand and apply clinical data standards within our health care system.
• Data architecture describes how technical information technology standards support the collection, analysis and sharing of health-related data.
• The MIS Standards provides an integrated approach to collecting, integrating and reporting financial and statistical data on the day-to-day operations of health service organizations.