Canadians are proud of their guaranteed universal health care system; many consider it to be superior to the private system in the United States. But there is one area in which the US health care system is ahead of the Canadian one, and that is the statutory protection of electronic medical records. The Canadian system will soon be playing “catch up” to their American counterparts as the age of digitization moves forward.
US Health Records Protected Under DR Plan
The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates that all health care providers have business continuity management programs and IT disaster recovery plans. In Canada, there is barely even a mention of IT DR for the health care sector, nor for any other sector.
Is this an indication that the US health care system is more responsible and forward-looking than the Canadian system? Not entirely.
HIPAA was enacted in 1996 as a way to protect Americans’ health insurance coverage when they change or lose their jobs – something that the Canada Health Act (CHA) has always guaranteed to Canadians. Because of HIPAA, the government also established national standards for health insurance plans, which is, again, something Canadians have had all along.
Different Security Needs in Canada
The difference is that Canadian health care standards have always been delivered via provincial health care systems and therefore delivered uniformly, while the US system is scattered among various private health care providers, each with their own systems and methods. The Canadian system had no real pressing need for standardization in the first place.
But the US is far ahead of Canada in terms of electronic health records. This is more a necessity in the US, where patients may be moving from one health insurer to another and there are lots of independent players. The portability of US health care necessitates safeguards to protect the privacy and security of personal health records; therefore, US providers must back-up data and have IT DR plans in place.
Conversely, Canada’s universal health care system meant that Canadian health care plans did not need to be portable, and therefore not “electronic” and subject to the same security and privacy risks. Furthermore, Canadian health record keeping is not as technologically advanced as it is in the US; many Canadian medical records still exist only in hard copy (or hand-written form) at the doctors’ offices.
Canadian System Will Soon Need More DR Planning
Although these old-fashioned hard-copy health records are not subject to IT failure, government agencies are slowly encouraging the transfer of them to digital form (i.e. Electronic Medical Records or “EMRs”). This means that Canadian health care providers, including individual doctors’ offices, will need to establish contingency and IT DR plans.
As the outsourcing of Canadian patient records increases (as it has in recent years), including transferring records to databases in cloud-based data storage systems, Canadians will have an even greater need for legislation / regulation safeguarding the availability of their private health information.
In other words, it won’t be long before Canadian health care providers catch up to their American counterparts in terms of backing up data and having DR procedures in place.
