The Unity Health Toronto healthcare network, one of Canada’s largest Catholic healthcare networks, has launched VITAL, a collaborative health data platform that connects more than 160 hospitals across Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec.

VITAL was developed as part of Canada’s new federal AI Strategy, which was announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney in June. Its aim is to serve over 20 million Canadians, making it Canada’s largest data sharing network. It’s the national expansion of the GEMINI health data platform, which collects data from about 40 Ontario hospitals.

VITAL will receive $100 million in federal funding, which builds on $110 million in previously awarded funding from federal, provincial, and institutional sources. The project’s full funding will total more than $210 million over 5 years. The additional funding could extend the project to at least five additional provinces.

The platform was founded in 2014 by two internists at St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Fahad Razak, MD, and Amol Verma, MD. Razak is an associate professor of medicine and the Canada Research Chair in Data-Informed Health Care Improvement at the University of Toronto. Verma is Temerty Professor of AI Research and Education in Medicine at the University of Toronto.

VITAL collects near real-time (< 24-hour lag) hospital data with the aim of optimizing healthcare delivery, research, and innovation, while ensuring data privacy and protection. The system pulls raw, deidentified information from hospital computer records, including digital vital signs, imaging, bloodwork, medicines, details on treating physicians, and ICU visits.

Building a Proactive Healthcare System

“We’re now generating hundreds of thousands to millions of data points for every patient we see, to provide optimized patient care,” Razak told Medscape News Canada. “Those data are incredibly important for AI because they provide extraordinary depth per patient, which is what AI models need for clinical trials. Getting that information at scale has been challenging because the hospital data systems were never built with research in mind, they were built for delivering care.”

VITAL’s algorithms pull data from these different data systems and create a central repository of information that can be used for analytics, AI, and numerous other applications. “Obtaining the data isn’t enough. All the legal and privacy protections, patient oversight, and project management are also built into the system,” said Razak.

One of the major applications of the new platform is research, but its usefulness extends beyond that, according to Razak. One of the platform’s main features is that it allows hospitals to be proactive instead of reactive by enabling crisis prediction and response, for example. In this way, it may help the health system to become more resilient and enable it to react to the pressures it experiences. The platform can also signal if a patient is eligible for a new treatment or clinical trial.

“When I began practicing at St Michael’s Hospital 10 years ago, I worked on an extremely complicated ward with very sick patients,” said Razak. “Physicians like me received no systematic information about the care we were providing, so there was no way for me to know whether I had a higher adverse event rate than my colleagues, for example. Now, every physician gets information averages to see their prescribing and adverse events rate. It’s about helping the health system provide better care.”

Identifying Risk, Improving Care

Having access to this broader range of data allows hospitals to understand patterns and build models that can predict individual patients’ risks. This capability could foster improvement in patient care, from the optimization of operations to the identification of and response to individual patient risk such as mortality or sepsis, according to Andrew Bond, MD, chief health officer and head of public sector at WELL Health Technologies, and lecturer in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Bond was not involved in developing VITAL.

“This [capacity] leads to more reliable and effective insights, which enable us to better plan and deliver care,” said Bond. Access to these data could improve clinicians’ understanding of signals related to volume and capacity management in emergency departments, inpatient wards, and surgical suites. “This means longer-term planning and recruitment pipelines in response to environmental changes, time of year, or social and cultural events. For example, we know that when there are major concerts or sporting matches in large urban centers, traffic patterns and the incidence of motor vehicle crashes change. VITAL would enable concrete, responsive planning for those anticipated challenges,” said Bond.

“The data need to drive research. There have already been over 150 publications generated from GEMINI-related research, so we know that it’s already had a significant impact on patient care in terms of cost reduction to systems, but most importantly, it is ensuring the right care at the right place and time in a much more reliable fashion,” Bond concluded.

Razak and Bond reported having no relevant financial relationships. 

Evra Taylor is a widely published freelance medical writer and reporter with 20 years of experience covering a broad range of therapeutic sectors, including family health, cardiology, psychiatry, ophthalmology, and dermatology.