New digital directory helps researchers navigate Canada’s health data landscape
Canada has an abundance of health and administrative data that can be used to answer important research questions, but finding and understanding those data can be a major challenge. A new paper published in the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS) describes a freely available online resource designed to help researchers navigate Canada’s complex data landscape more efficiently.
Developed by a collaborative team of physicians, epidemiologists, data scientists, and patient partners, the Metadata Catalogue of the Sepsis Canada Network provides a searchable directory of health and population data sources from across the country. The catalogue was originally created to support sepsis research, but its developers say it has much wider applications for healthcare and population health research.
Sepsis, a life-threatening condition caused by the body’s response to infection, is responsible for one in adult nine deaths in Canada. However, understanding and improving outcomes for sepsis —and many other health conditions — often requires researchers to combine information from multiple sources. Until now, identifying suitable datasets and understanding what information they contain had often been a time-consuming and fragmented process.
The new platform is a metadata catalogue providing "data about data." Rather than containing personal information, it describes characteristics, structure, and contents of numerous data sources, helping researchers understand what data are available and how different sources might be used together.
The team reviewed hundreds of national and regional data sources before selecting the most valuable resources for inclusion. The catalogue currently includes information on 83 Canadian databases, national, multi-provincial, and province-specific resources. For many of these databases, the catalogue also provides detailed information about the variables collected.
The range of information covered is extensive. Alongside healthcare data from hospitals, emergency departments, outpatient clinics, long-term care facilities, rehabilitation services, and homecare programmes, the catalogue includes information on prescription drugs, laboratory testing, and immunisation.
Importantly, it also helps researchers identify data relating to wider social determinants of health, including education, income, employment, immigration, language, ethnicity and environmental exposures such as air pollution. By helping researchers understand how these different sources can be linked, the catalogue supports more comprehensive studies of the factors that influence health and healthcare outcomes.
The authors argue that by making Canada’s health data landscape easier to navigate, the catalogue could remove barriers to research, encourage new collaborations, and accelerate studies that inform healthcare policy and practice. The resource is publicly available and fully searchable online, offering researchers a new way to discover and connect data sources across Canada.
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Professor Allan Garland, University of Manitoba, Canada