As Ontario's health system continues to evolve toward greater integration, one persistent challenge remains: access to in-depth, connected data. Providers across hospitals, community care and public health have all been working toward system integration, yet access to consistent, connected information has remained elusive. In a landscape where patients move freely across regions and sectors, those gaps in data often mean missed opportunities for coordination, insight and improvement.
That picture is starting to change. Across Ontario, digital health is reshaping how information flows between health partners and how decisions are made. The Ontario Hospital Association's Integrated Decision Support (IDS) is helping providers overcome long-standing “data blind spots" by connecting more than 150 health service providers and 11.5 million patients. Through IDS, hospitals, community organizations, primary care teams, and public health units can see the continuum of care, tracking patterns, outcomes and performance with shared, timely data.
IDS supports hospitals in several ways – not just by improving access to information, but by reducing the “grunt work" of data collection and analysis. This frees up time and resources so teams can focus on what really matters: driving meaningful changes at both the individual hospital and health system level.
Simplifying Hospital Reporting
Across the province, the Ministry of Health (Ministry) periodically introduces new reporting requirements for hospitals, which often require hospitals to gather, format and submit complex data on short timelines.
For many hospitals, the first challenge is figuring out where to access the right information and how to organize it for reporting. Without support, this can mean hours of manual work and added administrative effort for hospital teams.
IDS provides a streamlined approach to reporting, helping hospitals save time and work more efficiently.
When new reporting mandates are introduced, IDS provides hospitals with pre-built templates, dashboards, and tools that align with the Ministry's requirements. Through its 'build once-for-many' approach, IDS delivers ready-to-use reports, reducing the effort required to access and work with the data. Peer comparisons are simplified with the ability to customize peer groupings depending on the activity or indicators in question. By integrating hospital catchment areas with census and marginalization data, benchmarking can more accurately reflect the unique communities each hospital supports.
“Our support team works directly with the field to create and host reporting templates on IDS' platform," explains David Tanner, Team Lead of Analytics and Client Relationships and Senior Health Systems Analytics Advisor for IDS. “When a new mandate comes down, hospital teams naturally ask, 'Where can I drill in on this data?' For our subscribers, the answer is already there in IDS."
IDS' responsive and agile approach allows the team to quickly address new reporting requirements and provide timely support to hospitals across the province. By making data readily available and actionable, IDS streamlines data-collection processes so hospitals can spend more time on planning, performance and evaluation.
At the core of this approach is IDS' commitment to customer success. The team works closely with hospitals, listens to evolving needs, and delivers sector-wide solutions that make compliance easier while ensuring hospitals get lasting value from their data.
IDS is part of a broader movement in digital health – one where data is no longer just collected but connected. To learn more about IDS, and how you can join, visit www.oha.com/IDS.