Health care is at a turning point. Across Ontario and beyond, hospitals, community organizations, and system partners are being asked to deliver more – better outcomes, stronger integration, greater accountability – with limited resources. Yet for all the progress made, one truth has become increasingly clear: the health system cannot evolve by following the status quo.
To meet today's challenges, health care needs to be grounded in evidence, guided by data, and responsive to what that data tells us. Decisions can no longer rely on fragmented information – they must be informed by a comprehensive, timely and accurate picture of patient care, system performance, and population needs.
That shift is already underway through the growing focus on digital health and data integration. The Ontario Hospital Association's (OHA) Data and Analytics suite of tools continue to strengthen the health system's data capacity through tools that make information more accessible and actionable – turning numbers into insights that support sector-wide planning, performance, and accountability.
Supporting Financial Oversight and Workforce Planning
In response to hospitals' needs, the OHA developed a suite of health finance tools to help hospitals access and analyze their financial data, benchmark performance, and identify areas for improvement. Tools like the Financial Health Dashboard and OHRS Miner provide insights across key indicators while Explorer tools enable custom reporting and deeper analysis. Specialized dashboards also support hospitals with unique needs like research impact and schizophrenia care.
In a sector where competition for skilled professionals is fierce and roles are highly specialized, having access to accurate salary data helps hospitals and health organizations offer competitive packages, align pay structures with market standards, and ensure internal equity.
“We offer a wide range of indicators – hospitals can track vacancy rates, turnover, and absenteeism, while our health finance analytics tools provide insights into metrics like current ratio, working capital, and total margin," says Maggie Fung, OHA's Director of Data and Analytics.
“These are just a few of the many indicators that hospitals can use to drive better financial and workforce planning. The tools allow hospitals to manipulate and drill down into their data, benchmark against peers and provincial averages, and identify areas for improvement. They're powerful resources that support innovation and informed decision-making across the sector."
Improving Patient Experience
Today, the patient voice is no longer a peripheral concern – it's central to how we measure quality, equity, and performance. Patient experience data offers a direct line to understanding how care is delivered and perceived and plays a critical role in shaping population health strategies – highlighting disparities in access, communication, and cultural safety, which help health leaders target interventions where they're needed most.
Th OHA's long-standing commitment to patient experience measurement has helped inform and improve hospital practices, reinforcing the idea that high-performing health systems are anchored in a deep understanding of the patient perspective.
In 2022, the OHA launched a modernized program that equips hospitals with timely data, peer benchmarking tools, and opportunities for collaboration, enabling more efficient, patient-centred care and fostering system-wide learning and accountability.
“Our patient experience measurement program allows hospitals to be better positioned to improve care quality and experience" says Sue Bhella, OHA's Patient Experience Manager.
“Hospitals can tailor their approaches to amplify the patient voice and integrate equitable practices to ensure feedback reflects the diversity of their communities. And with the shift to digital measurement, hospitals can now receive data daily – enabling faster connections between patient feedback and frontline teams and driving more timely and informed local improvements."
Driving System Integration
In a system where data is often fragmented and siloed, critical insights can be missed – impacting care coordination and outcomes. Building a better health system starts with shared insight – tools like Integrated Decision Support (IDS) help organizations see beyond their own walls and is delivering real-time, actionable insights across the care continuum.
IDS gives providers an in-depth view of a patient's journey across care settings. Built for shared collaboration, IDS links patient data from over 150 health organizations across regions, covering more than 11.5 million unique patients. This tool addresses long-standing data “blind spots" and supports tracking throughout the health system – from primary care and paramedic services to acute, post-acute, community, and home care. IDS also links normalized datasets and applies flags, risk scores, and indicators across the patient journey – giving providers a clearer line of sight, even when patients cross regional boundaries.
New data are added weekly, ensuring timely analytics for system planning, performance management, integrated care, outcome evaluation, and population health. And with hundreds of pre-built reports and dashboards, IDS simplifies data interpretation, helping health care teams spend less time preparing data and more time using it to inform decisions.
“We believe that a sustainable, effective system needs to be integrated across health partners," says Anthony Jonker, OHA's Vice President of Data and Analytics. “Understanding how patients from one organization are using services in another – and being able to track and analyze those patterns – gives us the insight needed to make changes that lead to a more effective, integrated health system, ultimately improving patient care."
The Foundation of Innovation
Building a data-driven system isn't just about technology. It requires moving away from siloed approaches and embracing collaboration, transparency and continuous learning. Data is the foundation of innovation – enabling us to uncover patterns, test new ideas, and iterate quickly. The future of health care will belong to systems that are not only compassionate, but informed – grounded in numbers, evidence, and the collective intelligence of the data we already hold.
To learn more about the OHA's Data and Analytics portfolio, visit www.oha.com/data.