Vision & Scope

PS-CA:BC Patient Summary Overview

A Patient Summary is a point-in-time summary containing a standardized set of key clinical and contextual information about a patient's health and treatment. The purpose of a Patient Summary is to bridge the gap in patient care between different care settings by: reducing the need for providers to spend time looking for patient information in different systems; and reducing the need for patients to repeatedly answer the same questions during transitions in care.

International Patient Summary Standards

In 2021, Canada and the G7 nations committed to “work towards adopting a standardized minimum health dataset for patients’ health information, including through the International Patient Summary (IPS) standard” (pan-Canadian Patient Summary, Dec 2021). The purpose of the IPS is to enable patient summaries to e shared across regions and countries in a standardized way.

Canadian Patient Summary Standards

To fulfil Canada’s G7 commitment while addressing provincial and territorial variances, Canada Health Infoway is facilitating a collaborative development process to publish a pan-Canadian Patient Summary specification (PS-CA).

The PS-CA is based on the IPS specification, as defined by IHE, HL7 and ISO/DIS 27269. It describes the building blocks to create and share a condition-independent and specialty-agnostic patient summary.

The PS-CA: BC Patient Summary Project has been endorsed by Canada Health Infoway and BC Provincial Digital Health as a key strategy to support patient information sharing across care settings. PS-CA: BC aligns with the PS-CA, and with the inclusion of BC- specific guidance. The first release for this project will be Transactional Patient Summary. Specifically, a primary care provider sends a patient summary to an acute care clinical end point. The second phase use case will focus on on-demand sharing from a repository.

Since the PS-CA is based on the IPS, provinces and territories can configure their building blocks to address variances and ensure alignment with the IPS specification. British Columbia has committed to aligning as close as possible with the Patient Summary sharing work with the PS-CA. The BC Patient Summary Project has focused on an initial Release that meets the minimum requirements as outlined by clinicians. BC Providers in community/clinic settings have not historically shared information digitally outside of their settings. As a result, the BC requirements are expected to evolve as clinicians become more comfortable with sharing of information and of the clinician requirements of a Patient Summary. BC-specific deviations from the PS-CA and business considerations for both Release 1 and future releases will be articulated through the Guide. The naming of the BC version of the PS-CA is PS-CA:BC.