Home Care Reporting System 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 Home Care Reporting System (HCRS) was launched in 2006–2007. It contains demographic, clinical, functional and resource utilization information on clients served by publicly funded home care programs in Canada.

HCRS captures data on clients at multiple points throughout their home care services.

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 organization characteristics that supports comparative reporting and benchmarking is also captured.

Find out more about home care, including reports and analyses based on HCRS data.

Data Source

HCRS captures data from many types of organizations responsible for providing publicly funded home care services.

Data submissions to HCRS come from:

Provincial or territorial ministries of health
Regional organizations (such as regional health authorities or community care access centres)

Data Coverage

HCRS captures standardized, client-specific clinical, demographic, administrative and resource utilization information within a single reporting framework.

As of 2017–2018, the following provinces/territories were submitting data (partially or completely) to HCRS:

Yukon
British Columbia
Alberta
Manitoba
Ontario
Nova Scotia
Newfoundland and Labrador
Implementation is also under way in Saskatchewan.

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

Data Availability

Longitudinal data is available from 2006 onwards.

Prior to 2006, limited data is available for some organizations only. Please complete a data request form.

Classification

Key components of HCRS are:

The Resident Assessment Instrument–Home Care (RAI-HC©)
The interRAI–Contact Assessment (interRAI-CA©)

The RAI-HC© and interRAI-CA© are two assessment instruments developed by interRAI© to assess and measure outcomes and resource use across the continuum of care.

Data Elements

The RAI-HC© provides the clinical data set for long-term supportive care and maintenance home care clients. This standardized instrument provides a common language to assess the health status and care needs of individuals. It also provides a rich data source for planning and quality improvement, including information on:

Health, functional and cognitive status
Environmental assessment
Treatments
Medications

In addition to the data elements, the RAI-HC© assessment instrument automatically populates a number of outputs or measures, including:

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
The RUG-III case mix methodology
Risk-adjusted quality indicators

These derived variables are also available on request.

More detailed information about the HCRS data elements can be found in our eStore.

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