Business Context > Business Model

Business Model

Context

Many organizations across the province that provide health care services require access to up-to-date and accurate provider and service information for the provision of care. The role of the Provincial Health Services Directory is to serve as an authoritative provincial source of provider person and organization/location and health service information to:

• reduce manual efforts related to maintaining the provider information within point of care systems and provider repositories

• increase the accuracy of provider information by providing EHR contributors access to the most-up-to-date provider information

• reduce exception-handling for provider correspondence (e.g. returned fax/mail)

• support authentication and authorization of provider persons and locations when providing or accessing information in Ontario’s EHR

• identify information related to service providers such as hours of operation, eligibility and a description of services provided

• provide capabilities to share and synchronize provider, organization and health service information and associated request forms with health care provider Point of Care systems

The Provincial Health Services Directory acts as an information sharing service to ensure high-quality and current data that’s consistent and available across the use of the information. PHSD provides capabilities to synchronize data with external service directories to ensure minimal impact to vendor systems as well as the ability to directly consume data via direct query APIs. All access to PHSD information is protected by Ontario Health’s ONE Access Gateway that provides authentication and authorization confirmation to ensure the data is secure and private.

Model

The PHSD maintains a comprehensive source of provider, organization and health service information using information received from different contributing sources, including:

• provider person license data and identifiers from regulatory colleges

• provider organization/location data from selected Regulatory Colleges

• provider person and organization/location information from the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) Corporate Providers DataBase (CPDB)

• eReferral Service Listings from Referral Management Vendor systems (current) and Hospital Information Systems (near future)

• community service information from The Healthline Information Network (current), 211Ontario (planned) etc.

• mental health and addictions service information from ConnexOntario

Additional sources of information can be added to support improved data quality and currency.

Figure - System Context

The identifiers, licensing information and demographic information maintained in the PHSD is then used by other EHR services to associate information collected in the EHR with the healthcare providers who provided the services or the information. The provider identifiers, license information and demographic data stored in the PHSD are also made available to authorized organizations through multiple query service endpoints. Health Service Information collected across sources will be used for a number of purposes (planned) including Service Discovery and Navigation, Transfers of Care and health care service ordering.

Available Functions

The following functions are available to organizations that query information from PHSD:

Table - Available Functions