Smile Continues to Push the Pan Canadian Initiative at Infoway’s Projectathon

In March 2023, Smile Digital Health continued its successful participation in the pan-Canadian Projectathon event, building on its achievements from the previous year's event held in March 2022. This year, Health Canada Infoway collaborated with provinces and territories, inviting Smile Digital Health, and other innovators to participate in Projectathon 2023. As a result, the design and review of the pan-Canadian Patient Summary specification were contributed to by all jurisdictions, with Alberta and Ontario taking the lead on implementation efforts. Thanks to this close collaboration, the national and provincial Patient Summary specifications are now harmonized and ready for trial implementation.

The Canadian version of the Gazelle interoperability testing platform was utilized to manage the event scenarios. Projectathon 2023 focused on supporting Patient Summary implementation projects across Canada, with the aim of testing the harmonized national and provincial interoperability of Patient Summaries specifications (i.e., PS-CA, PS-ON, PS-AB). In addition, this year's event paid special attention to secure exchange, document format, and content validation of FHIR® Patient summary documents.

Tests were carried out in both no-peer and peer-to-peer scenarios to verify that the Patient Summary document conforms to the anticipated format, contains the required information, and employs the correct data types and value sets outlined by PS-CA. The SmileCDR acted as the Repository Server and validated the submitted content against PS-CA profiles.

Another group of test cases was carried out in both no-peer and peer-to-peer scenarios to verify the recommended secure exchange methods for CA:FEX documents, which support CA:FEX specific integration profiles such as CA:Sec, CA:Aud (Canadian implementation guidance for ATNA), as well as IHE CT and IHE IUA. In this set of tests, the SmileCDR took part as the Authentication Server for the first time.

The SmileCDR demonstrated excellent performance in both sets of tests. Furthermore, these tests facilitated the identification of certain features that could be implemented to enhance and streamline CA:FEX-based communication.

Smile Digital Health demonstrated its readiness for multiple provinces by focusing on a single repeatable codebase for implementation across provinces, while supporting small differences through configuration.The company's Health Data Fabric solution, which uses FHIR-based standards, proved to be a market leader with ambitious plans to connect health data across Canada.