CPCSSN Case Definition Report
The Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN) is a national collaboration that extracts and standardizes primary care electronic medical record (EMR) data to support population health research, disease surveillance, and quality improvement. This 2025 report outlines CPCSSN’s methodology for developing and validating EMR-based case definitions, which are standardized algorithms that accurately identify patients with specific health conditions.
With over 30 validated case definitions now in use—including for diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs)—CPCSSN enables high-quality data analysis across jurisdictions and EMR platforms. Validation is performed using structured protocols and manual chart reviews, ensuring that algorithms perform consistently and reduce misclassification bias.
The report introduces new case definitions for gout, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and highlights planned development for conditions such as frailty, low back pain, and sexually transmitted infections. To expand data usability, CPCSSN is exploring natural language processing (NLP) and optical character recognition (OCR) to extract clinical details from free-text and scanned documents.
CPCSSN’s validated case definitions are essential for ensuring that EMR data is used accurately and ethically in research and decision-making enhancing primary care data infrastructure across Canada.
