Functional status and health information in Canada: proposals and prospects

The primary obstacle to evidence-based health care quality assessment in Canada is reliable data on health encounters and episodes of care. The recent Federal/Provincial Health Accord will enhance health data collection, including standardized functional status information (FSI) for administrative records. Canadian health policy developers also agree that FSI is needed to bridge data gaps since alterations in functional status create the continuity that links all episodes of care and health service utilization. Given Canada's universal, single-payer, health financing structure, the prospects for coherent and systemwide data collection are good. This article describes the Canadian health care from the perspective of health information, and surveys proposals in electronic health technology development, the obstacles that need to be faced, and the prospects of doing so.