Continuing Care Metadata

CIHI is moving to the Integrated interRAI Reporting System (IRRS), and it’s time to retire our legacy home care and long-term care systems

CIHI is excited to announce that IRRS will be the new standard and reporting system for long-term care (LTC) and home care data. This change is being made in response to stakeholder interest and in alignment with CIHI’s mission to provide comparable and actionable information to accelerate improvements in health care, health system performance and population health across the continuum of care. As a result, CIHI will decommission the previous reporting systems for home care (HCRS and HCRS-CA) by March 2025, and the reporting system for LTC (CCRS) by March 2026.

Please contact us at specializedcare@cihi.ca with any questions regarding this announcement.

Overview

The Continuing Care Reporting System (CCRS), launched in 2003–2004, contains demographic, clinical, functional and resource utilization information on individuals receiving continuing care services in hospitals or long-term care homes in Canada.

Clinicians use the information

To support front-line care planning and quality improvement at the point of care.
To support planning, quality improvement, funding and accountability at the management and policy-making levels.

Information on facility characteristics that supports comparative reporting and benchmarking is also captured.

Find out more about long-term care, including reports and analyses based on CCRS data.

Data Source

Nursing staff and other health providers conduct assessments of individuals in two types of participating publicly funded facilities:

Hospitals with continuing care beds, commonly known as extended, auxiliary, chronic or complex care beds.
Residential care facilities, commonly known as nursing homes, personal care homes or long-term care facilities.

Data Coverage

Coverage includes detailed clinical, functional and service information that identifies residents’ preferences, needs and strengths, and provides a snapshot of the services they use.

As of 2017–2018, the following provinces/territories were participating partially or completely in CCRS:

Yukon
British Columbia
Alberta
Saskatchewan
Manitoba*
Ontario*
New Brunswick
Nova Scotia
Newfoundland and Labrador

(* both hospital and residential care sectors)

Historical data coverage varies. Details are available on request. Please complete a data request form.

Data Availability

Longitudinal data is available from 2003 onward.

Prior to 2003, limited data is available for Ontario hospitals only. Please complete a data request form.

Provisional data:

Q1 (April to June), available September 15
Q2 (July to September), available December 15
Q3 (October to December), available March 15
Q4 (January to March), available June 15

Classification

Data is primarily collected using the Resident Assessment Instrument Minimum Data Set (RAI-MDS 2.0), a clinical assessment instrument developed by interRAI.

Data Elements

The RAI-MDS 2.0 contains more than 500 data elements that document clinical and functional characteristics of residents, including

Cognitive function
Vision
Psychosocial well-being
Continence
Health conditions
Skin condition
Treatments/procedures
Communication/hearing
Mood and behaviour
Physical function
Disease diagnosis
Nutritional/oral status
Activity patterns

The RAI-MDS 2.0 assessment instrument also automatically populates

Clinical Assessment Protocols, used by clinicians to identify risk and support care planning
Outcome scales that summarize function in areas such as cognition, physical function and frailty/instability
RUG-III case mix methodology and risk-adjusted quality indicators

More detailed information about the CCRS data elements can be found in the Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) MDS 2.0 User's Manual.

Data Quality

CIHI ensures that the quality of the information in our data holdings is suited to its intended uses and that data users are provided with accurate information about data quality. Read more about our Data and Information Quality Program.

The following data quality documentation is available:

Privacy impact assessment

Privacy impact assessments (PIAs) evaluate and address the privacy impacts of programs and systems.

Go to the Privacy and security page to view the PIA, which contains further information about the purposes, data elements and data sources for this data holding.

Contact us

For further information, please email

help@cihi.ca