Balraj Dhillon: Digital ID and Responding to a Healthcare Crisis for a Canadian Province

I'm Paul Raj, Dylan I'm director of engagement delivery at Simio solutions. Simio solutions is a identity and access management provider. We have offices globally. We primarily focus customers in north America. We're managing over 150 million identities globally. And with my role at Simo solutions, I'm currently, you know, managing customer engagements, deliveries of existing projects.

And so today I'll be talking about the province of new Brunswick and you know, how we supported them through the COVID 19 pandemic and more specifically how we were able to set up testing for them and how digital identity was facilitated that testing capabilities. So I'm gonna kick off by talking briefly about new Brunswick. New Brunswick is one of the smaller provinces in Canada. It's one of the Atlantic provinces. The population is just under a million.

So again, it is a smaller province in comparison to some of the larger provinces in Canada and healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded healthcare system. And so that means that, you know, all the data is aggregated in one spa and all the services are, are being delivered publicly a, a little bit about my health, new Brunswick, my health, new Brunswick, again, as I mentioned, you know, healthcare is being delivered publicly and with this, the electronic health record and the way that digital health is delivered is delivered through central repositories of data.

And tho those do make healthcare data aggregated and available to digital healthcare applications. And that facilitated, you know, with the, the situation that we're gonna be talking about a little background on Simo in the province of new Brunswick Simos been working with province of new Brunswick since 2017, we've been working in POCs and pilots around modernizing the way that services are delivered to citizens in that province.

And the earlier part of this year, we did actually kick off work with their healthcare organization, might help new Brunswick to digitize the way that healthcare was being delivered to the province. And, you know, there were some underlying themes here around the need for virtual care, the need for patient access that, you know, they wanted to talk about, you know, and focus on early on in the year.

So again, you know, there, there was, you know, an opportunity to modernize the way that services are being delivered to citizens. They wanted to leverage existing data sets and use that to provide access to patients.

And, you know, there was that theme of virtual care. It just didn't pop up the way that, you know, the demand started once the COVID situation kicked off. So fast forward, you know, March timeframe, 2020, the COVID situation now is in full swing. And so priorities start to change with my health, new Brunswick.

They, you know, start to see the need globally that they need to shift in, in their projects and their initiatives to start to support with COVID 19. And so that, you know, included the need for increase digital presence for virtual care solutions, try and limit the face to face interactions.

And again, you know, Simia was working with the province of new Brunswick around their digital identity strategy when the COVID 19 situation hit. And that really allowed us to accelerate some of the past work that we had been working on and enable them to facilitate digital access to COVID 19 test results. And so one of the things that they, you know, felt the need and they, they wanted to deploy very quickly was, you know, a COVID 19 test results, online service, something that was easy to use something that would enable citizens to access either mobile or web.

And that was kind of the key thing that kicked all of this off. Some of the complexities when we were developing this, you know, we knew that establishing a customized user interface and all of this, it typically takes a lot of time around working with user design teams. So there was a lot of iterations that went back and forth, you know, and we actually did this in a total of 18 days, you know, end to end, but, you know, working with their team from a user design perspective, this was something that they felt needed to be on point.

They needed to ensure that there was nothing left for a user to guess here. And so there was a lot of complexities on the UI perspective, integrating into their API and clinical data and enabling that, you know, was something that was a little complex on the, my health new Brunswick side. And so this was, again, the first time they had actually deployed any patient facing solution that would allow patients to access any of their data.

So they, they had to modernize some of their clinical data interfaces and ensure that that data could be pulled accurately and quickly enabling identity proofing was, you know, a key complexity here and, you know, how we needed to validate against authoritative data sources.

And so I'll walk through the flow in my next slide, that kind of shows, you know, how a user was able to first get a registration code, but, you know, validating them against authoritative data sources was something that, you know, they really needed to ensure that they got to a place too, to ensure that the right test results were being delivered to the right individual. And so part of the process that, you know, I'm gonna talk about was coordinating with all of the testing centers.

And so my health new Brunswick had to coordinate with all of their test centers to ensure that they had the process where they were able to link a individual, give them a registration code so that they could go online and check their results versus coming back into the physician's office or to a COVID 19 site to get their test results. So again, I, I mentioned, you know, in terms of identity proofing, how it was happening was when a individual was getting their COVID 19 test completed, they would then obtain a registration code from the COVID 19 test center.

That registration code would be part of the process to register your user identity. And so that really meant that, you know, we were able to elevate a user's identity. And so they would go through a pretty standard user registration process to create their digital identity. The patients were, again, given that user registration code, which was able to elevate their identity level and really validate their identity.

And so in parallel, you know, that activity to validate that information is happening against their provincial client registry in the client registry is a big data set of all of the patients in the province. And so they were doing a integration into their PCR, which enabled that authoritative data source and that identity proofing capabilities.

And then, you know, throughout this entire digital journey, we were able to link a user with a username and password as well. So in terms of, you know, some of the key metrics, you know, it's been live for over three months now, and citizens are able to obtain their personal home information in a privacy and protected manner. And so again, they, they can access this. It's not a mobile application. It's literally just a web service that citizens can access. Some of the key metrics to date, 5% of citizens in the province have registered for an account since April, 2020 when we went live.

And so that, you know, from our perspective is a huge success. And we, we can anticipate that this number will continue to grow over the course of the next, you know, few weeks we are in our second wave in Canada, much of the provinces in the cities are seeing spikes in COVID 19 positive test cases.

So, you know, these fundamental services around having this testing site up and running is gonna become even more important. And we'll see that number grow as well. And so results are made available to patients 24 to 48 hours after a test. A lot of that is contingent on, you know, the testing personnel to have the bandwidth and the capability to complete a test in a timely manner as well in the future.

You know, what they, what they are really seeing is that this is gonna enable them to deliver additional health, digital healthcare in the province of new Brunswick and support with virtual care capabilities as well. So, you know, while this is meeting the COVID 19 need, as, as we see it, this is also going to facilitate users, being able to access their health records, being able to access, you know, applications for their children, for their dependents and things of that nature. So it's really, you know, kind of sparked digital healthcare and that access as well.

And as I mentioned, you know, they, the, my health new Brunswick and the overall government of new Brunswick really wanna tie this into additional government services that they're delivering digitally. And so that's gonna facilitate a lot more services happening digitally versus face to face. And we're already seeing this in other provinces in Canada where, you know, services like driver's license, renewal, digital benefits being distributed to individuals is all happening digitally. So this has really sparked more of a digital transformation for the province of new Brunswick as well.

I'm gonna talk about the healthcare across Canada and the future, and this resonates with not only new Brunswick, but other provinces that we're working with as well. And you know, more from a patient perspective, we're seeing growth from patient portals, contactless check-in telehealth and virtual care virtual care has grown significantly. There's been a couple of smaller organizations that were delivering virtual care previously, and that we have seen a significant growth on as well with that.

You know, we're also seeing that, you know, healthcare organizations like my help, new Brunswick are seeing the need for, to focus on consent and privacy as well. How do you ensure that a patient's data is protected? How do you ensure that, you know, they're able to put blocks on their data and limit access to data for individuals and so on and so forth, but also how do you have a patient allow their delegated, their family to get delegated access to their health records as well. And so the other side to this is the healthcare provider side.

And so through this pandemic, what we've also learned is that seamless integration into electronic health records and hospital information systems is very important because healthcare providers need to ensure that, you know, if you're walking across the street from one hospital to another, that that data is made available in a seamless manner. And so healthcare providers also want to support virtual care and telehealth and access to digital tools. One thing that I wanted to talk about really quickly that really ties into all of this is in Canada.

We are working towards a Penn Canadian trust framework for identity. And so working with the province of new Brunswick, we're trying to get to a place where we have a, you know, centralized model in the way that we are issuing digital identity. And so Simio along with our competitors and other innovators in the space, sit on a Penn Canadian trust framework where we see digital identity as a critical piece of it. And so we launch the Penn Canadian trust framework in only October, 2020.

And that was after multiple conversations with many of the stakeholders, including banks, including healthcare organizations and governments as well. Finally, just to wrap it up, I'm gonna be talking just, you know, what is the digital health focus that we're seeing?

And again, you know, with COVID 19, we're seeing the need for patient access services. We're seeing a lot of conversations happening around modernizing architecture to ensure that, you know, things are being able to be delivered in a more modern API manner. And so for digital health, we're seeing that the need for everything to be connected, third party services and partners, we see a focus on patient journey to ensure that, you know, we are looking at it from a patient's perspective. We are seeing the need for secure interactions.

Security needs to be paramount as, as part of this entire thing, consent and data privacy. I, I spoke about this and consent and privacy is critical as well. And regulatory compliance in Canada. We also have regulatory compliance that we must adhere to that is it. I hope everyone enjoyed the presentation and got a sense of some of the challenges we had in new Brunswick and where we're taking digital health in the province of new Brunswick in Canada overall.