Acess to Canadian Institute of Health Information Data

I had a question this morning from a UofC faculty member about access to CIHI database – he specifically requested National Ambulatory Care Reporting System from CIHI. Since it’s not my first time having the request for CIHI data, thought I would pass on the info. from Peter Peller to you in case you receive similar questions in the future. I’ll also post this in Keeping Current Blog. “We don’t have any special arrangement with CIHI so we don’t have the access code that your researcher needs. I registered an account with them but when I tried to access the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System it gave me the following message (even though I had an account): Presently you do not have access to this service. Permissions to many services are granted based on CIHI's relationship with a client organization. To request access please contact CIHI's eSupport Desk at 613-241-5543 or by sending an email to help@cihi.ca The only suggestion I would have is for the researcher to contact CIHI either at the telephone # or email address specified in the message. I guess the other way to get at the data would be via Alberta Health & Wellness since they submit the data to CIHI and then get it back. CIHI does offer a fee-based service for custom based data requests: http://www.cihi.ca/CIHI-ext-portal/internet/en/document/standards+and+data+submission/data+requests/reqdata. Graduate students can access CIHI data at no cost through the Graduate Student Data Access Program. Through the Statistics Canada DLI program we will be provided with two Discharge Abstract Database Research Analytic Files (clinical and geographic) that are de-identified samples from CIHI’s Discharge Abstract Database (sampled from 2009-2010 and 2010-2011). These will be microdata files and access to them will hopefully commence by December or early in the new year.”