Rural Personal Health Record

The Rural Personal Health Records (rPHR) project is dedicated to enhancing digital health access for rural and remote patients. By enabling individuals to track and manage their health records, the initiative promotes patient engagement, improved care coordination, and interoperability across health systems.

Health Gateway and Patient Empowerment Team

Over the past year, the Rural Personal Health Record (rPHR) team deepened its collaboration with the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) and Health Gateway’s Patient Empowerment Team. The partnership continues to advance shared goals that improve the patient and provider experience across rural, remote, and Indigenous communities in British Columbia.

The partnership identified four key priorities for improving access to clinical and discharge summary information through single sign-on: clinical summaries with goals of care, discharge summaries, single sign-on access, and proxy access.

Clinical summaries and discharge summaries each support continuity of care in different ways. A discharge summary reflects an episode of care such as a hospital stay, while a clinical summary captures the broader context of a person’s health journey: chronic conditions, functional status, social supports, and care preferences. This complete picture is essential for understanding and documenting goals of care that truly reflect a patient’s values and circumstances.

Currently, both types of summaries remain under-shared. The rPHR team is focusing on enabling secure, standards-based access to discharge summaries through the provincial Health Gateway. Establishing this pathway will create reusable digital infrastructure that can later support additional kinds of shared information such as longitudinal care plans, advance directives, and functional status documentation.

The movement toward shared, structured summaries began internationally more than a decade ago and is now a priority in Canada. While some health authorities, including Vancouver Coastal Health, Northern Health, and Island Health, are exchanging clinical information through systems like CareConnect, many providers and patients still cannot access these important records. This limited information flow represents a form of health information blocking that the Connected Care Act (Bill S-5) aims to address.

The team’s ongoing efforts to open the flow of information will ensure that critical health data can follow patients wherever they receive care.

Goals of Care Shared Care Project

Collaboration between the rPHR team and the Shared Care Committee’s Goals of Care initiative continued to strengthen in 2025. Joint dialogue, engagement, and strategic alignment have amplified the reach and impact of both efforts.

The Goals of Care initiative works to ensure that every patient’s values and preferences are documented, accessible, and integrated into their care. Like the rPHR initiative, this work depends on the secure and ethical sharing of clinical information. Clinical and discharge summaries form the foundation needed to interpret care preferences safely and compassionately. Together, the teams affirm a shared principle: continuity of relationships relies on continuity of information.

Bill S-5 – The Connected Care Act

Collaboration with patient partner Claire Snyman, whose leadership through Networked Health has inspired renewed federal advocacy for the Connected Care Act, marked another milestone this year. Through this partnership, RCCbc proudly joined as an endorser, demonstrating our commitment to advancing interoperability across Canada’s health system.

Reintroduced to Parliament in 2026 as Bill S-5, the legislation addresses systemic barriers to information sharing that particularly affect rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. By promoting national interoperability standards, prohibiting data blocking, and advancing equitable access to digital health information, Bill S-5 represents an important step toward a more connected, patient-centred health system.

Connected Patient Experience Strategic Planning Council

The rPHR team now contributes to the Connected Patient Experience (CPE) Strategic Planning Council, a monthly forum that brings together leaders from across BC’s digital health and public health sectors. Participation in these discussions ensures a strong rural voice in provincial planning and helps keep the realities of rural care front and centre as digital health strategies evolve.

Building on the progress made this year, the team will continue working to ensure that discharge summaries are placed directly into the hands of patients when they leave the hospital. This next phase includes a detailed technical and informatics assessment to understand the current state and guide a roadmap forward. Insights from this work will help expand access to other important pieces of care documentation, including plans of care and goals of care, which support better continuity and transparency throughout the patient journey.

In the coming year, the project partners will also continue to champion for system-level improvements such as single sign-on and proxy access. These changes aim to make it easier for patients and authorized caregivers to securely access essential health information. To highlight the value of this work, the team will create a series of mock-ups that show what a Personal Health Record component could look like. Using synthetic data, these designs will feature discharge summaries, goals of care, and examples for unattached patients, visually demonstrating how care plans can improve communication and understanding among patients, caregivers, and care providers.