About the Longitudinal Health and Administrative Data Initiative

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The Longitudinal Health and Administrative Data (LHAD) Initiative is a partnership among provincial and territorial ministries of health and Statistics Canada, as well as the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the Canadian Council of Cancer Registries and the Vital Statistics Council for Canada.  The objective of the Initiative is to address important information gaps by ensuring that key administrative data, such as those routinely collected through the health system, can be used to undertake pan-Canadian research to improve the understanding of relationships among risk factors, socio-economic characteristics, health status measures and health care utilization.  The research involves the linking of provincial and territorial health administrative data within themselves, and with Statistics Canada population health survey data, the births and deaths databases, and the Canadian Cancer Registry. In addition to complementing the important record linkage research already being done within individual provinces, LHAD studies create invaluable opportunities to learn from comparisons among jurisdictions, as well as facilitate larger studies for less common types of events and conditions. In short, the LHAD Initiative is intended to establish the foundation for a Canadian record linkage program to help further the advancement of knowledge about health determinants, outcomes and their relationships.

Statistics Canada is the operational arm of the LHAD partnership. Two divisions within Statistics Canada - the Health Statistics Division (HSD) and the Health Analysis Division (HAD) collaborate in supporting the Initiative.

HSD is responsible for ongoing administrative support including organizing Steering Committee meetings and providing secretariat services to the Initiative. It is also responsible for building and maintaining the LHAD data processing environment, securely storing and processing LHAD datasets, and producing linked analysis files for all approved studies.

HAD provides research support to the LHAD program via the LHAD Research Team.  HAD is the primary source of health research within Statistics Canada.  Its mandate is to provide high quality, relevant and comprehensive information on the health status of the population and on the health care system.  This project represents one of four research studies undertaken by the LHAD Research team from the research agenda developed by the LHAD Steering Committee in 2008