Health Information Standards

Digital health standards are essential to enable the seamless integration and efficient management of healthcare information. Making clinical information available electronically to clinicians and patients offers the potential to transform how health care is delivered.

Standards are part of a strong foundation to realizing the value of digital health solutions which reflect the cultural, demographic, and geographic diversity of the province, recognizing the unique needs of First Nations and marginalized communities, to ensure safe, quality access to health care services for all BC citizens. Health information standards provide the technical framework and clinical terminology that enables health care providers to communicate and share health information that is contextual and unambiguous in meaning.

Additionally, standards support the safe and secure exchange of health care information (e.g., patient demographics, medications, labs, diagnostic imaging) across the continuum of care to better transform the patient and provider experience, facilitate clinical decision support tools (e.g., alerts and notifications), enable advanced data analytics, and support population health outcomes (e.g., screening, public health).  As such, Health Information Standards are an important part of interoperability, which is the ability for information to flow seamlessly between different health systems, workflows, and solutions.

 To learn more about health information standards in B.C., please refer to the links;

• Standards Catalogue