Following on our earlier Globe and Mail op-ed and Law Bytes podcast, I am pleased to co-author a commentary on health data sovereignty and security with Kumanan Wilson and Mari Teitelbaum in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The key points identified in the piece:
- Canada’s population-based health data are an invaluable resource that provide economic and health system opportunities through the development of health-related artificial intelligence algorithms.
- Concerns about the potential monetary value of these data, access by the United States for surveillance purposes, and how data often reside on cloud servers owned by US companies, make it essential that Canada redouble efforts to ensure the security and sovereignty of data.
- We suggest a multipronged approach that includes encrypting health data by design, requiring health data be hosted on Canadian soil (data localization), inserting a blocking statute into privacy laws, and investing in the development of Canadian sovereign cloud servers to host health data.
