The Healthy Data Collective is a self-governing community that employs the Collective Impact governance framework to guide its function. Collective Impact is a governance model popularized by Stanford University in 2011, and has been successfully used worldwide, including by the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement to guide projects focused on social good. In Canada, there are successful large-scale Collective Impact projects on homelessness and poverty.
Collective Impact provides a structured approach for solving complex societal problems involving multiple parties. It is defined as an approach to collaboration that allows a network of community members, organizations, and institutions to advance a shared vision by learning together and achieving population and system change.
Health data in Canada is defined by a lack of clear oversight, accountability, and direction, and has a decades-long track record of costly failure despite serial attempts by traditional agencies and overseers to enact system reform through conventional models of oversight.
The Healthy Data Collective functions by uniting all health sector stakeholders around a common set of evidence-based health data design principles, like those outlined in the pan-Canadian a Health Data Charter. Accountability to common principles provides a way for people from different organizations, backgrounds and experiences to find collective goals and work together to achieve them.
The pan-Canadian Health Data Charter is a set of ten principles proposed by the Expert Advisory Group of the pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy, intended to foster a harmonized approach to optimized health data in Canada. In October 2023 federal, provincial, and territorial (FPT) governments affirmed the principles of the Charter as a guide for collective action towards a shared vision for health data in Canada.
The Healthy Data Collective efforts are aligned with the Charter’s principles to promote a harmonized vision for health data design and use in Canada.
