The Health Data Charter Collaborative
Coming together for shared action around health data
The Health Data Charter Collaborative is an independent, non-aligned, community-of-interest dedicated to championing implementation of person-centred health data architecture and the adoption of the Health Data Charter across our diverse health systems.
The Goal
We aim to foster data sharing across all our diverse public and private health systems.
So that:
Each person effectively has one integrated health record wherever they go – enabling providers to deliver informed care in a timely, efficient manner while reducing many of the harms arising from built-in systems limitations.
Leaders, policy makers, researchers and private sector organizations have the integrated population health data they need to innovate and make systems changes leading to improved health equity, outcomes, experiences, and cost management.
A Key Requirement
It is essential we adopt a person-centred health data architecture across all our health systems.
Achieving needed data access and aggregation does not require creating a single centralized system.
Rather, it requires adopting a shared set of principles, policies, and standards that facilitate data interoperability and collaboration across a multiverse of systems while respecting diversity and independence; and shifting our notion of a ‘health system’ to embrace all those organizations, data stores, and devices that hold health-related data, whether public, private, not-for-profit, or personal.
The Challenge
We must overcome a frustrating lack of system-level progress despite shared aims, ceaseless efforts, and a multitude of local achievements.
The limitations of our disjointed systems were profoundly exposed during the COVID Pandemic when health leaders and practioners did not have the timely data they needed to make vital decisions. Growing stresses across our systems amplify the demand for effective shared action and change.
The sheer scale, complexity, and diversity of our health systems makes top-down implementation approaches fraught, impractical, and improbable.
Bottom-up approaches take too long and are often cut-off from the centres of decision and funding.
A third way is needed.
You are part of the way forward.
We invite you to connect with us to learn and do more.
We are enabling ‘Collective Impact’ by championing the adoption of shared standards and principles and by providing a locus and stimulus for collaboration across boundaries and differences.
The ability to bring interested individuals, groups, and organizations together around shared aims and principles while sidestepping the usual barriers to collaboration requires a respected, non-aligned catalyzing force independent of vested interests.
The Health Data Charter Collaborative was created to fill this role. Health Data Charter forms a both foundation for collaboration across our systems and bedrock on which our organization is founded.
The real work of system transformation will not be done by the small core secretariat, but rather in degrees by participants in vast interlocking web of formal and informal networks, each contributing ideas and actions until their collective impact brings about change.