Test Data Supporting the Test Cases

This section describes the data that may be used to prepare your system in support of the No-Peer and Peer-to-Peer testing.

Clinical Data Sets

As described in the Test Cases page, there will be a set of test cases focused on ensuring that the Patient Summary document is structured in the expected format and that it contains the required information using the correct data types and valuesets, where specific valuesets are defined as required in the national (PS-CA) and harmonized provincial Patient Summary specifications from Ontario (PS-ON), British Columbia (PS-CA:BC), and Alberta (PS-AB). 

The following table provides the clinical data sets for testing. This data may support No-Peer and Peer-to-Peer testing.

Data from Other Vendors

During the Projectathon, you will be partnered with other vendor(s) for Peer-to-Peer testing. Vendors may send documents to each other and subsequently retrieve documents from each other. (e.g. Vendor A sends a Patient Summary document to Vendor B. Vendor A is then able to retrieve the Patient Summary document previously submitted to Vendor B.)

Example Clinical Scenario

The following clinical scenario presents the journey of a patient who does not have a family physician (i.e., unattached patient). Unfortunately, this is becoming more common. Although the Patient Summary will not solve the problem of patients not having family physicians or other primary care providers, it may improve patient safety issues and dangerous information gaps that patients/families are navigating in the current environment. In the clinical scenario presented below, the journey of Jesse is described in the current-state "with unconnected systems" and in the future-state "with connected systems". 

What problems does the PS-CA solve?

Even in the age of digital health, system incompatibilities across the spectrum and a lack of data integration and portability at points of care mean that data is often “locked” in an individual system. This causes several issues:

1. Unless visiting their own family physician (where the bulk of primary data resides), most other healthcare episodes typically lack access to data, raising the risk of unintended side effects or adverse reactions and reducing quality of care unintentionally
2. Patient satisfaction suffers as expectations are not met due to extended waiting times for diagnosis, when information is either missing or inaccessible and at times inaccurate
3. Inefficiencies in care provision due to time required to locate information for clinicians already feeling burn-out
4. Inability for funders to receive reliable business intelligence to support the most effective funding decisions

When data language, common data elements and exchange methods are aligned and technical components are available, information can be shared quickly, efficiently, and easily whether within a region, a province, a country or international setting. To learn more about the Patient Summary and the tangible benefits that we can expect, please visit the PS-CA v2.0.0 DFT Ballot.