Ontario gives access to residents’ health data in hopes of building better healthcare-related tools

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A new project coming out of Ontario wants to create better healthcare-related tools for its citizens. How are they going to do this? By giving access to its residents’ health data. Ontario has entrusted medical research organization University Health Network and MaRS Discovery District (which Quartz describes as a “cross between a tech incubator and WeWork) to develop a platform that will give approved researchers and companies access to its citizens’ health data.

Called Project Spark, the goal is create an API or a way for developers to request information from the government’s data cache from its 14 million residents. With the API, developers can create apps that will give doctors access to a patient’s full medical history or give Ontarians complete access to their health records and even record health issues as they occur. Researchers, on the other hand, could be given another level of access to get anonymized data on Ontarians that meet certain criteria and assist in their studies.

There are currently 100 companies lined up to get access to the data, but MaRS won’t name which companies these are. The main focus of Project Spark is to help develop software that medical professionals and patients can both use. Later on, they hope the data can be used for medical research.

With sensitive personal data being shared, it’s inevitable to be concerned about who will be getting access to this information—doctors are worried that the information can be used for marketing purposes and the same concern can be raised by the Ontarians. For the first phase of the project, this doesn’t seem to be as big an issue as only doctors, specialists, nurses, and patients will get access to the information. But MaRS says it is working on how this personal information will be handled once it’s sent out for research and given access to people outside the doctor’s office.