Ontario’s plan to create a provincewide primary care electronic medical record system is an important step toward a more usable, connected health system.
For people living with diabetes, that matters because care is rarely delivered in one place. It happens across family practice, specialist care, hospital services, community programs, screening initiatives, and follow-up care. When those parts of the system are not connected, people get missed. Screening is delayed. Referrals stall. Risk is harder to spot. And the burden of holding the system together often falls on the patient.
That is why DAC has consistently pushed for stronger digital infrastructure that does more than store information. We need systems that allow data to move appropriately and securely across care settings so it can actually support better decisions, better coordination, and earlier intervention.
This announcement came during the Ontario Digital Health Conference, where DAC’s Senior Lead of Digital Health, Conrad Pow, joined discussions on the future of provincial health data infrastructure. What was clear throughout the conference is that Ontario is moving toward a more connected model of care. The opportunity now is to ensure that this work is designed with a clear line to patient benefit and includes the patient perspective as it is planned out.
At DAC, our digital health strategy is focused on exactly that. We work at the intersection of patient-oriented research, primary care data, and implementation. Our goal is not digital transformation for its own sake. It is to make health data more useful in the places where it can prevent complications, strengthen care pathways, and support more equitable access to care.
That is especially true in our diabetic retinopathy screening work.
DAC has shown that primary care data can be used to identify people living with diabetes who are overdue for eye screening and at risk of being missed by the system. That is not a theoretical benefit. It is a practical example of how better use of routine health data can support earlier outreach and more targeted care.
The bigger opportunity is provincial. With the right infrastructure, governance, and partnerships in place, primary care data could help support broader surveillance approaches that identify people at risk of diabetic retinopathy earlier and connect them to screening before vision loss occurs. That kind of approach would move us closer to a system that is proactive rather than reactive.
The same logic applies across diabetes complications more broadly. Connected primary care data can help support earlier identification of risk, more timely intervention, and stronger links between evidence, care delivery, and system planning. It can also create better conditions for responsible innovation, including digital tools and AI applications that are grounded in real-world care and shaped by patient priorities.
For DAC, digital health is not just about interoperability. It is about building the data backbone needed to improve care, reduce avoidable complications, and make prevention and screening efforts more equitable across Ontario.
We are encouraged by this direction and will keep pushing for digital health systems that are not only connected, but useful, implementable, and accountable to the people they are meant to serve.
