Since May of 2021, sponsors and staff from the Ministry of Health (MOH), Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA), eHealth Saskatchewan (eHealth), Saskatchewan Health Quality Council (HQC), Saskatchewan Cancer Agency (SCA) and SCPOR have been working to create Saskatchewan’s first fully integrated and streamlined multi-agency data access platform for health research and analysis. This new platform is called Health Research Data Platform - Saskatchewan (HRDP-SK).
The HRDP-SK is a platform that streamlines the process for researchers to access health data. The data will be housed in a central repository and governed by a Master Health Data Sharing Agreement (MHDSA). HRDP-SK users are supported with consultations and training. They will be provided access to extensive resources including a data dictionary and database overviews that will support increased data literacy and effective use of data.
The HRDP-SK will build significant research capacity and may be leveraged in the future to build capacity for all secondary data access. The platform will be beneficial to both researchers and data trustees. Researchers will have timely, appropriate, reliable, and predictable access to health system data in a remote access environment. The HRDP-SK staff and data trustees will work collaboratively to implement standardized and efficient processes for managing data access requests and data sharing, thus minimizing variation, redundancies and inefficiencies.
The processes developed to support data access requests are aligned with the national standards produced by the Health Data Research Network (HDRN) to guide the implementation of data access for research throughout the country.
Data services was able to provide a notable data linkage in the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation/SCPOR supported Care pathways analytics: Integrating patient-centered outcomes in economic evaluations of care pathways in Saskatchewan. The overall goal of the research project was to evaluate the clinical and economic impacts of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Care Pathway Program (COPD-CPP). The COPD-CPP was implemented in the Regina area of the Saskatchewan Health Authority in September 2017. Researchers aimed to analyze the impact of COPD-CPP on healthcare utilization and healthcare costs by comparing intervention and control groups using state sequence analysis and sequence cluster analysis
In establishing the intervention group, it was determined that it would not be possible to identify with a high degree of certainty which individuals were enrolled in the pathway by using admin-data only, therefore a data sharing agreement to access the master list of participants was put in place. The list of participants of the COPD-CPP was deidentified to ensure privacy and consistency using the same algorithm that would allow for linkages with the administrative health databases.
