| Historical Information |
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| This post is about a previous Session of Parliament. Any legislation here that did not receive Royal Assent has been terminated. |
C-72 – Connected Care For Canadians Act – makes it easier to access your healthcare records and share them with healthcare providers.
Background
Not a lot to say here. Companies that handle your healthcare records want to keep you going back to them, so they make it harder for anyone they don’t like to access your records. (Often including you). With the increased use of digital healthcare services, like virtual consultations and prescription filling, this has the potential to get a lot worse. Mark wants to stop this with C-72.
What it does
So first up this lays out the minimum standards for allowing access to healthcare information. If a province or territory has its own regulations that are at least as good as the ones in this Act then nothing here applies to them.
There’s two things that this Act handles regarding healthcare information, the first is data blocking. Data blocking is anything that prevents, discourages, or interferes with the exchange of information. I’m going to guess that would include things like needing to pay a fee to get your records so you can send them to a new doctor. Under C-72 all data blocking is prohibited.
The second big thing this Act looks for is interoperability. A service is interoperable if it makes it easy for you to access all of your healthcare records and exchange it between doctors or services. Under this Act all healthcare information held by service providers will need to be interoperable.
The government will handle the details of this through regulation. That includes the details of how to determine if something is interoperable, the complaint process when a service goes against this Act, and the punishments for violating it. If a provincial government passes its own legislation that’s at least as good as this the feds will also have the ability to exempt them from these regulations.
Progress of C-72
C-72 was waiting for its Second Reading vote when Session 44-1 ended from Parliament being prorogued. It could be brought back in the next Session if the House gives unanimous consent for it or if it passes a vote.
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