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Canadians need new ways to access, understand and use their own health information. A new “digital front door” is opening new possibilities in Nova Scotia.
In brief
- Canadians want easy access to their own health information.
- Yet it remains either out of reach or difficult to understand.
- A new “digital front door” is opening new possibilities in Nova Scotia.
- Collaborations and feedback are essential in human-centred design that lets data tell a meaningful story to each user.
Today across Canada, fewer than four in 10 people can access their health information electronically. Even as the digital health revolution is well underway, outdated systems, fragmented data sources, privacy laws and other factors put our personal data largely out of reach.
Even when people can access their information, most can’t decipher what they are seeing. That’s because most health care IT systems were set up for billing and administration, not patient access. As a result, the data is simply a puzzle of disconnected pieces, rather than a useful tool.
But what if it wasn’t so complicated? We know that Canadians want seamless access to their information, and doing so is essential to empowering people to manage their own health and better engage in their own care.
EY is working with provincial governments and their health system partners to improve the patient experience by making data more accessible and usable. In Atlantic Canada, we find a new project that is making that goal a reality.
A digital front door in Nova Scotia
In Nova Scotia, the Department of Health and Wellness, Nova Scotia Health Authority and IWK Health Centre have been hard at work facilitating an ongoing digital health transformation.
They collaborated with EY to create a user-friendly portal where any citizen can view their information and engage with the health system — a “digital front door” to their health care.
Our teams worked with diverse stakeholders to pull data from various systems in different care settings, with a focus on each person’s history of medications, health visits, appointments, vaccines and immunization records. We funnelled this disparate data into an interoperability framework called FHIR to modernize it and translate it into easily displayable information.
The result is YourHealthNS — a one-stop shop where Nova Scotians can book services, receive reminders, navigate care, access health records and discover care options quickly. It is accessible to anyone in the province through a computer or mobile app, with community libraries offering terminals to those who need support.
Through the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub, the YourHealthNS app launched in 2023, followed by a health records pilot in early 2024 where we began to see its potential and impact. The system is now led by an operational team, with expanding capabilities and functions that further drive innovation and efficiency.
Keys to a successful launch
Projects that make health data accessible, understandable and meaningful are complex. To succeed, projects should be supported by four pillars:
- Follow human-centred design. At EY, rather than leading technology first, we lead design first — so that systems are conceived and built around the user’s true needs. In this case, it meant analyzing the end-to-end patient journey holistically to understand where and when they need their records, highlight areas of frustration, and plan a smooth and reliable digital experience.
- Collaborate early and often. Creating a patient-centred tool takes a team of cross-functional professionals — designers, clinicians, data scientists, patients, privacy advisors and more — who bring unique perspectives and ideas. A collaborative exercise reaches outcomes that work across the board.
- Have the data tell a story. In health care, each piece of information is part of one person’s story. We used data visualization to bring these stories to life, using colour contrasts, icons and placement of data. The goal was to help users clearly interpret the big picture of their health. We’re now experimenting with how to display trends over time in a focused way.
- Seek and use feedback. To build a friendly design, we gathered information through testing, asked for specific feedback and kept revising the interface until it reflected the diverse needs of our users. Through provincial collaborations we invited patient-family advisors to test drive the YourHealthNS prototype and conducted a focus group with citizens. An evaluation team from Nova Scotia Health also surveyed the public on this project for broader feedback.
Summary
Canadians need new ways to access, understand and use their own health information. Putting meaningful data in their hands requires human-centred design and a deeply collaborative process. You must imagine the future you want to create, analyze whether it is possible, and co-create, test and refine an approach that truly works for people receiving care and for those trying to manage their wellness journey.
In the era of data transformation, the time is now — and our experience in Nova Scotia can serve as proof that people are very eager to have new and improved access to their information and their local health-care systems.