Good morning. Without a national medical record system, our information can be scattered or worse: get lost. We’ll have more on the fight to fix the disconnect, along with updates from the federal election campaign and how to tune out this weekend. But first:
Today’s headlines
Prime Minister Mark Carney imposed targeted tariffs on American-made automobiles but stopped short of broader retaliatory levies
Donald Trump’s tariffs have raised the odds of a recession in the United States, which could have ripple effects on Canada.
As Ukraine looks to lower Trump’s tariffs on steel exports, experts are left guessing what’s the strategy behind Russia’s exemption
Illustration by Romain Lasser
Secret Canada
Canada’s medical records systems are unwell
Hi, I’m Chris Hannay and I write about the business of health care for The Globe.
A few months ago, I was speaking to a relative living in the U.S. who was receiving treatment for a serious medical condition. During the conversation, they went to their phone to open an app and look at their medical records.
And I thought: Wait, you can do that?
I’ve been lucky enough so far in life (knock wood!) to not need ready access to my medical records. For me – and I suspect for many people – I think of my records as living in those ubiquitous folders you see on shelves behind a doctor’s office reception desk.
But when I thought about it more, I wondered why I couldn’t have easier access to my health data.
After all, for years now I’ve had an app on my phone where I could do most of my banking. Financial information is highly regulated and privacy-protected, just like medical info. Banks figured this out a while ago. Why couldn’t the medical system?
That’s a question I went out to answer, and the result is a story you can read online now and in print tomorrow. The answer is, like many things in life, complicated.
Some offices still work on paper records and faxes, and even for those that have moved to electronic records, different software doesn’t connect with each other.There are even more problems going on than just the patient access: doctors face huge barriers in sharing records with each other, even during potentially life-threatening scenarios in an emergency room.
Illustration by Romain Lasser
One challenge in writing the story was that the industry can get pretty jargon-heavy. My colleague André Picard wrote about this in a column recently: “Interoperability is not a term that rolls easily off the tongue. Nor is it a concept that captures the imagination of anyone other than data geeks.”
And yet, interoperability is very important! It’s the term for being able to share data across systems. So in writing this story, I tried to provide as many tangible examples as I could.
One came from a family doctor in Scarborough, Ont., Rebecca Lall, who told me how difficult it is get a patient’s test results from a hospital.
Picture this: the hospital has one software system for managing patient records, and Dr. Lall has another. But those two systems don’t really talk to each other. Instead, the hospital sends a fax to the doctor’s office. Dr. Lall takes the faxed page, retypes information from the page on her computer, downloads a file from the hospital’s system, and then imports the file into her office’s system.
Maybe that doesn’t sound too bad. But it’s at least five minutes of busywork, and that’s just for one test for one patient. Like most family doctors, Dr. Lall’s office has thousands of patients on its roster. That time adds up. And for what? She – or other members of her staff – certainly have better things they could do if they had that time back.
Illustration by Romain Lasser
And the dangers of a fragmented system can be even more serious. The story includes an example of a man who died without knowing the clinically significant results of a test. His wife and primary caregiver only found out the results after spending two years trying to get his records and making access-to-information requests.
One of the barriers here has been that the issue has the kind of red tape that can be hard to summon a lot of political will to fix. But the tide may be starting to turn. Some provinces are trying to modernize their systems – like in Nova Scotia, where they partnered with Telus Health on an app, or in Alberta, where all acute care centres were moved to one system.
The federal Liberals introduced a bill last summer to set new standards that would force interoperability across the country, but the bill got lost in political fights in the fall and then died when Parliament was prorogued in January. We’ll see if the issue gets picked up again when the federal election is finished. I’ll be following that in the coming months.
Learn more about Secret Canada, a freedom of information project from The Globe and Mail where you can search through a national database of FOI summaries and learn how to file your own.
Election 2025
‘They are all unjustified, unwarranted and in our judgment, misguided.’
Stellantis vehicles are unloaded at a car park facility used by the auto maker in Windsor, Ont. April 3, 2025.Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
Liberal Leader Mark Carney was on a conference call with the premiers yesterday morning, receiving the support of Ontario Premier Doug Ford for his retaliation measures. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he would revoke defence and market access agreements with Washington if it violated a renegotiated trade deal with Canada. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is proposing victory bonds as a way for Canadians to resist the economic effects of Trump tariffs. You can catch up here on Day 12 of the election campaign.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been found guilty of mischief for their roles in the 2022 mass protest in Ottawa.
Abroad: The death toll from the earthquake that hit Myanmar nearly a week ago rose Thursday to 3,145 as humanitarian groups scrambled to provide aid to survivors.
Drawing: A Montreal-area school board says a lawsuit has been dropped that had alleged student artwork was being sold online by a teacher without their knowledge.
Watching: Television critic Kelly Nestruck has some streaming ideas to help you tune out this weekend.
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