Design and testing of an architecture for a national primary care chronic disease surveillance network in Canada

Chronic diseases are a growing concern around the globe. In Canada, chronic disease care is taking an increasing share of health care budgets, and with an aging population, is threatening to overwhelm Provincial budgets where most health care is paid for. A chronic disease surveillance network fills an important gap in current public health surveillance systems. This paper describes the design and feasibility testing of an information technology and privacy architecture to extract, transform and transfer data from 7 electronic medical record systems used by 100 primary care providers in 6 province to a central data repository at the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory at Queen's University in Canada.