Canadian Institute for Health Information

CIHI was incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act in 1994. Federal, provincial, and territorial governments created CIHI as a "not-for-profit, independent organization dedicated to forging a common approach to Canadian health information". CIHI has a unique mandate to make health information "publicly available" to Canadians.

CIHI is governed by a 16-member Board of Directors that links federal, provincial and territorial governments with non-governmental health groups. Board members represent all health sectors and regions of Canada. The membership of the Board is dominated by Deputy Ministers of Health, although it does add a small number of academics to its associates.

CIHI has offices in: Toronto and Ottawa as well as branches in Montreal, and Victoria.

CIHI uses data from governments and hospitals across Canada to determine comparative statistics and costing algorithms that are available for use by healthcare ministries, hospital boards and the general public. According to former CIHI president and CEO Richard Alvarez, CIHI's scope of research and data tracking is wide-ranging and broad. In a 2000 interview, Alvarez said of CIHI: "You name it, we track it," including subjects such as physician migration patterns, availability of nurses, supply and demand of organs, and survival rates for transplant patients. For example, in 2000 CIHI determined that the rate of caesarean births in different regions of the country varied from a low of 12% to a high of 28%. This CIHI generated information was then used by hospital boards to measure themselves against the national and international benchmark (15% in 2000).

A 2009 study in the journal Chronic Diseases in Canada compared perinatal information in the CIHI's Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) with information found in a range a smaller clinically focused databases. According to findings of the researches, CIHI's DAD data compared favourably with the other databases and proved accurate for many of the diagnoses/procedures examined. The authors of the report concluded by supporting the use of the data in the CIHI DAD for national perinatal surveillance and research, with a caveat that appropriate inference rest on an understanding of clinical practice and the use of sensitivity analyses to identify robust findings.

The CIHI DAD is used to identify patients admitted for hip fracture surgery to any acute care hospital in Canada between 2003 and 2012 in the Canadian Collaborative Study of Hip Fractures.