Health data governance for research use in Alberta

Alberta has rich clinical and health services data held under the custodianship of Alberta Health and Alberta Health Services (AHS), which is not only used for clinical and administrative purposes but also disease surveillance and epidemiological research. Alberta is the largest province in Canada with a single payer centralised health system, AHS, and a consolidated data and analytics team supporting researchers across the province. This paper describes Alberta's data custodians, data governance mechanisms, and streamlined processes followed for research data access. AHS has created a centralised data repository from multiple sources, including practitioner claims data, hospital discharge data, and medications dispensed, available for research use through the provincial Data and Research Services (DRS) team. The DRS team is integrated within AHS to support researchers across the province with their data extraction and linkage requests. Furthermore, streamlined processes have been established, including: 1) ethics approval from a research ethics board, 2) any necessary operational approvals from AHS, and 3) a tripartite legal agreement dictating terms and conditions for data use, disclosure, and retention. This allows researchers to gain timely access to data. To meet the evolving and ever-expanding big-data needs, the University of Calgary, in partnership with AHS, has built high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to facilitate storage and processing of large datasets. When releasing data to researchers, the analytics team ensures that Alberta's Health Information Act's guiding principles are followed. The principal investigator also ensures data retention and disposition are according to the plan specified in ethics and per the terms set out by funding agencies. Even though there are disparities and variations in the data protection laws across the different provinces in Canada, the streamlined processes for research data access in Alberta are highly efficient.