Multiple Opportunities: Health Data Strategy and

Like to think about the big picture and ask the question why?

Want to wake up in the morning for something more than just the bottom line?

Up for working on some of healthcare's most complex and challenging problems?

Then consider this dynamic opportunity to be part of an entrepreneurial team in the Ontario Ministry of Health working on health care strategy and policy through digital and data-driven innovation.

Data and digital refers to using information and information technology, such as hospital information systems and electronic medical records, as well as innovation platforms and analytics solutions to improve the healthcare system. Technology advances over the last decade open up new uses for information not only to access health information for care, but also big data and artificial intelligence, genomics, population health, precision medicine, and more.

The ministry's Information Management Strategy and Policy Branch leads the development and implementation of data strategy and policy across all sectors of healthcare and plays a key role in designing new health system approaches to data to transform our citizens' experience of healthcare and push the boundaries of health innovation.

These are a few of the leading edge lines of inquiry in our strategy and policy work:
**Data for Good Policy in Healthcare**: This seeks to identify global government stewardship practices pertaining to data and innovation management in healthcare and other industries, and work on developing a provincial approach that demonstrates tangible and intangible health, social, and economic benefits for Ontarians. This will involve exploring the most innovative frameworks used by government to derive maximum value out of the secondary use of health and social data while preserving privacy, security, and public trust in government. This will include identification and consideration of the opportunities and risks associated with different frameworks, solutions, and approaches to determine the ‘best fit' based on the context presented.

**Responsible Health Innovation and AI Strategy**: This looks at developing a new framework to enable responsible innovation that relies on the use of digitized health information to develop inventions, products, and services for the benefit of patients, providers, and the health system. These uses will consider different models of partnerships, including use cases that promote the development of software as a medical device, digital medicine, precision medicine, personalized health care, learning health systems, and a health platform economy. Collaborations between the public and private sectors are often controversial where health data is implicated, yet the government relies on businesses to innovate and promote economic prosperity. Furthermore, health care is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries, consuming over 10 percent of gross domestic product of most developed nations. The emergence of big tech in health care presents new challenges for health regulators worldwide. This project will look at the strategic governance framework and operational model needed to support healthcare innovation, including considerations around AI ethics and oversight models.

**Health Data Stewardship and Governance**: As the use of digitized data continues to transform health care, there's a new imperative to share health and social data more broadly not only among patients, providers, and healthcare delivery organizations in the public sector, but also to expand this circle to include researchers and innovators, digital health companies, and direct-to-consumer service providers in the private sector. With the ever-increasing digitization of health information, new opportunities are arising to share and use information in different ways than previously contemplated (e.g. machine learning, health apps, etc.), and, increasingly, these technologies are becoming foundational to the delivery of contemporary, high-quality care. In recent years, there has been keen interest in exploring new data governance models and stewardship roles that can improve public transparency by providing a mechanism for both top-down and bottom-up oversight. Ontario's health privacy legislation is in the process of undergoing modernization and further work is required to define the full requirements of a modernized data protection framework in the data and digital era. This will include working on conceptual strategy and policy approaches, jurisdictional review and analysis, developing and undertaking a broad public consultation strategy and working with a multitude of stakeholders.

**Open Innovation in Healthcare**: The next frontier of digital medicine brings longstanding economic policy debates into the limelight within the context of health care. Some unique aspects of digital innovations in health care include the sensitivity of personal health information and considerations of data ownership, stewardship, privacy,