Background

Established in 2008 through a partnership between the College of Family Physicians of Canada and Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN) is a network of 14 practice-based research and learning networks in 8 provinces and 1 territory. Currently, over 2 million patients and 1500 primary care clinicians participate in CPCSSN.

Mission

CPCSSN extracts de-identified patients’ data from the electronic medical records of primary care practices across the country. CPCSSN applies cleaning, coding, and standardization algorithms to transform raw EMR data into meaningful information that can be used for quality improvement, chronic disease surveillance, and research.

The goal of CPCSSN is to encourage, facilitate, and support collaborations between government, health authorities, health professionals, patients, and researchers. CPCSSN aims to seek out, develop, and facilitate the adoption of healthcare innovations to improve healthcare delivery systems across the country.