If you want to fix Covid, and everything else, start with the data

By Dana O’Born, CCI’s Director of Strategic Initiatives

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The word “crisis” is overplayed right now.

COVID-19 is, of course, a public health crisis which led to an economic crisis.

Canadian real estate is facing an affordability crisis, and depending on which political party you favour, you might believe we’re in the midst of an income inequality crisis too.

And in case you forgot, we’re still a long way from solving the climate crisis.

While it’s an overplayed word, I’d like you to consider another crisis that feeds into all the challenges I’ve already mentioned.

Canada is facing a national data crisis, and our inability to harness this vital 21st century resource is making everything else harder.

Because it’s front-of-mind, let’s talk about COVID-19 and health care, but these ideas apply to the other crises too.

Many of us make a daily habit of checking case counts, the hospitalization rates, vaccine doses administered. We pore over graphs with seven-day rolling averages, and dive into whatever local data we can find, trying to understand the risks and trends.

We know the value of data when it comes to the pandemic.

And yet, as a country we’re doing an abysmal job of harnessing the power of data. For the first four months, the federal government wasn’t even collecting basic data on COVID-19 cases.

And as we worry about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, we learn that our ability to track shipments is hampered by the fact that no province has the ability to scan the barcodes printed on each vaccine vial.

In our world of software, connected devices, artificial intelligence and automation, data is the underlying factor which makes systems more precise, processes more efficient.

Canadian innovators have been calling on the government to develop a National Data Strategy that meaningfully considers all the ways that data flows through our economy, and through our society. Data is a critical input into Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is a new factor of production.

Data is so foundational to our technology-enabled processes, we believe that the government needs a holistic approach which considers everything from national security and democratic values to economic opportunities and citizen rights. IBM estimates that 90% of world’s data as been created in the last 2 years. That’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day, for the nerds out there.

And frankly, our Canadian governments aren’t nearly where they need to be when it comes to using data. As a country, we live in a state of bureaucratic paralysis that prevents us from adopting modern services.

We are often so afraid of the risks that we lose sight of the upside. If procurement guidelines and cumbersome rules are slowing us from adopting modern technologies, and we’re still using fax machines in 2021 to send medical records, something has gone horribly wrong.

If privacy concerns prevent public health officials from collecting and analyzing population-level medical data, while individuals stream medical data hither and yon to all manner of private companies through their smartphone or smartwatch, does that really make sense? If Facebook and Loblaws know more about your health condition than your doctor, are we governing data-driven economy optimally?

What’s frustrating to me is the fact that we have so many great Canadian companies that are building brilliant software systems that use data to help medical professionals work smarter. And yet most of these companies say they have better luck selling their innovations in the United States or other countries around the world, because the Canadian procurement strategies are a nightmare — especially in health care.

But the word procurement has an awful lot of baggage in Canada, and I want you to think about the effect that is having on our government as a whole.

Politicians and government officials live in fear of the next Phoenix pay system debacle, because Canadians are astonishingly good at getting angry when they think government is wasting money. But we don’t get angry about all the modern government services we’re missing out on because the government decided to just stick with 30-year-old technology.

For years, experts and officials have known that our systems are antiquated, that we weren’t collecting the right sorts of data, and our technology was so cumbersome that we couldn’t even make good use of the data we have.

In Ontario recently, we saw the government unveil a digital and data strategy aimed squarely at unlocking government data. The Ontario approach sets up avenues for government to work with industry experts in order to establish clear data standards so that the private sector can build tools which seamlessly integrate with government data systems. This is a step in the right direction, and other governments should take note.

Health care must be one of the top priorities. It’s not just public good but also one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industry, with projected value of $10 trillion USD in 2022. Provinces hold an enormous amount of health care data, but much of it cannot be used, due to a lack of clear standards, open APIs, and a panoply of often-outdated systems.

This can change, and it must change to improve health outcomes.

Good data makes everything easier, and not being able to use data makes everything harder — especially in an age when citizens are ready to take more responsibility of their health data.

The pandemic will end. But if we don’t demand better from the government, the data crisis will drag on, and it will make it harder for us to solve all the other crisis we need to tackle once we beat COVID-19.

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The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national business council representing more than 140 scale-up technology companies headquartered in Canada. If you’d like to receive government policy updates and perspectives like this from the CCI, sign up for our newsletter .

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