Standards Governance

Digital health standards are essential to enable the seamless integration and efficient management of healthcare information. Provincial Digital Health Leadership in British Columbia (B.C.) recognizes the importance of developing a health system that is connected and one that leverages digital health standards to support patient care, improve health outcomes, and enhance system performance. The Ministry of Health (MoH) and Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) developed a refreshed Digital Health Strategy (DHS) with four strategic objectives:

• Enable patient engagement,  
• Improve provider experience,  
• Establish a connected health system, and  
• Enable the health sector business enterprise.  

Foundational elements of the provincial Health Information Exchange (HIE) are interoperability and standards providing a common language to

• support health data exchange 
• enable informed clinical decision making, and 
• allow better coordination between care teams.   

The refreshed DHS provides an opportunity for decision makers to align around Pan-Canadian standards to streamline integration, enable secure exchange of provincial health data, create efficiencies in the delivery of care, reduce administrative burdens for providers, and enable patient participation in their health care journey.   

To support the refreshed DHS, a Digital Health Standards Alignment Committee (DHS-AC) has been established to drive alignment, adoption, and implementation of digital health standards across the B.C health sector. 

Purpose 

The purpose of the DHS-AC is to guide the development and implementation of digital health standards across the B.C. health sector purposes and to champion the benefits of implementing digital health standards for interoperability across the B.C. health ecosystem. 

Governance and Reporting 

The DHS-AC will be governed by the Digital Health Governance and will have representatives from the MoH, PHSA, health authorities, Health Information Management (HIM), Doctors of BC (DoBC), nurses and nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and Point of Service Vendors. The DHS-AC will report to the Digital Health Standards Executive Committee.