What Kind of Information Can CIHI Provide to You?

Who We Are

• Established in 1994, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) is an independent, not-for-profit corporation that provides essential information on Canada’s health system and the health of Canadians.

Our Media Services

• CIHI has a wide range of data and information that are publicly available on our website. In addition, we have a proactive media team that can help journalists find the information they are looking for. This can be achieved in many ways, such as through an interview with an expert or customizing statistics.

Our Data and Information

Our health data and information is focused primarily in the following four areas:

• Types of Care
• Spending and the Health Workforce
• Health System Performance
• Factors Affecting Health

Types of Care

• Acute care hospitals: We can tell you how many Canadians are admitted to hospital every year, what they’re being hospitalized for, average costs for individual procedures and how these vary among provinces and health regions. This includes, but is not limited to, birthing statistics (including Caesarean section rates), heart and stroke hospitalizations, mental health admissions, surgical statistics and injury hospitalizations.

• Organ donations: CIHI tracks information on all solid organ donation and kidney disease cases in Canada, including transplantation and dialysis rates, survival rates, types of donors (live versus deceased) and patient characteristics.

• Diagnostic imaging: We gather information on how many MRI, CT and other diagnostic machines are operating in Canada, and how they’re being used.

• Other: We also have data and information on other elements of care in Canada, such as the use of prescribed drugs, home and continuing care, primary health care and the use of emergency departments.

Spending and the Health Workforce

• Spending: Our National Health Expenditures database is the most up-to-date and comprehensive source of health spending information in Canada. It shows how much we’re spending on health care, where the money is going and who’s spending it (public sector versus private sector). It also highlights provincial and international comparisons.

• Health workforce: How many family physicians or nurse practitioners are working in Canada and how is this changing over time? CIHI collects and annually updates data on a wide variety of health professionals across Canada, including physicians, regulated nurses, occupational therapists, pharmacists, physiotherapists and 26 other health professions. Information is available by province and health region, and includes migration and demographic trends of health professionals.

Health System Performance

• Access/Wait Times: CIHI has been mandated to collect comparable information on wait times in priority areas and report on progress in meeting clinically recommended benchmarks. The priority areas identified by Canada’s first ministers are as follows: joint replacements, cancer care, cardiac care, sight restoration and diagnostic imaging. We’ve also produced special reports on access to primary health care and emergency department waits.

• Patient Safety and Quality of Care: We publish special reports and analyses to measure risk and inform prevention efforts. CIHI also produces annual health indicators—or comparable measures of health system performance—by province and health region, such as hospital readmission rates for heart attack and stroke patients. Our annual hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR) provides acute care facilities across Canada with an important tool to assess patient safety and quality of care.

Factors Affecting Health

• Canadian Population Health Initiative: Why are some Canadians healthier than others? What can be done to improve the health of all Canadians? Research from CIHI’s Canadian Population Health Initiative examines many factors that affect our health:

• Place of residence
• Socio-economic status
• Mental health and well-being
• Healthy living and behaviours, including healthy weights

Contact Us

If you need help finding data, want to talk to an expert, or want to stay up-to-date on the latest releases, contact the media team at [email protected], find them on the web at www.cihi.ca or follow them on Twitter