sharing data
delivery, and effectiveness of rural
and northern health services
has requested data to determine
where graduating students go to
practise medicine.
•
Requests for aggregate (nonnominal) physician or program
data (such as the number of
family physicians in a particular municipality; the number
of complaints about physician
prescribing practices; or the
number of endoscopy procedures
performed in out-of-hospital
premises). In such instances, our
data could: support planning
and decision-making; provide
context with respect to the
health-system environment; or
be used by the government to
answer media questions.
•
Requests by hospitals for physicians’ contact information. For
example, a hospital would use
that data to ensure that patients’
discharge summary reports are
sent expeditiously to the right
physicians, enabling continuity
of care.
The College values the privacy of
its members and has legal obligations with respect to confidentiality.
When a request is approved, the organization or individual requesting
the information may be required
to sign a data sharing agreement.
Data-sharing agreements are legal
documents that are required before
data is released. Specific requirements include restrictions on data
usage, prohibition of secondary
use, requirements with respect to
confidentiality, data storage and
security, and time-specific destruction of data.
We have FAQs about our new
strategy on our website.
20
DIALOGUE • Issue 3, 2014
Batch Release policy rescinded
In adopting a new strategy for
handling data-sharing requests, the College’s Release
of Physician Information
in Batch Form policy was
rescinded. It is replaced by a
new decision tool that will be
used to evaluate all data sharing requests received by the
College, including requests for
public physician information
in large volumes.
Dan Faulkner, Deputy Registrar
The Batch Form policy
was introduced in 2002 as a
means to evaluate requests
for public information about
physicians where that information was sought in large
volumes. An example of such
a request would be to receive
in a single load – in batch
form - the practice addresses
of all Ottawa family physicians. While the information
is available on our public register, the requester would ask
for the information in order
to avoid the labour-intensive
effort of inputting the address of each Ottawa FP.
Physicians