Ontario gives access to residents’ health data in hopes of building better healthcare-related tools
Sunday, June 17, 2018 at 4:00PM 
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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.