Canada Health Infoway - Towards a National Interoperable Electronic Health Record (EHR) Solution

Canada Health Infoway Inc. (Infoway) is leading Canada's initiative to develop interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) and accelerate their adoption nationwide. Specifically, Infoway's core business is to invest with its partners-primarily provincial and territorial governments-in the development of robust, interoperable EHR solutions and in their deployment and replication across Canada. This partnership approach produces results faster, more cost-efficiently and more effectively than if any one partner acted alone.This chapter presents a high-level view of Infoway's seven-year plan to have the basic elements of interoperable EHRs in place across 50 percent of Canada by the end of 2009. In particular, the chapter discusses the business and technical approaches that have been developed to pursue Infoway's aggressive goal. These approaches allow individual jurisdictions to deliver local and regional solutions cost-effectively while contributing to a larger, interoperable national system.