Balancing Access and Accountability in a Data-Driven Health System
From e-Health26 Track: Guardrails for Growth: Governing Health Data
As health data becomes more central to care delivery, innovation, and system planning, the conversation is shifting from access alone to accountability. The challenge isn’t just unlocking data—it’s doing so in ways that maintain trust, protect privacy, and ensure responsible use at scale. The Guardrails for Growth Track at e-Health26 explores how governance, stewardship, and emerging technologies are shaping a more secure and sustainable data landscape.
Session highlights
Stewardship is emerging as a critical enabler of progress at a system level. In Health Data Stewardship: Unlocking the Power of Our Health Data, Jesse Fracassi (CIHI) examines how Canada is approaching data as national infrastructure. The session highlights the development of a pan-Canadian stewardship framework designed to address not just technical barriers, but also the policy, cultural, and legislative challenges that limit data sharing. This work points to how stronger governance can result in value, while maintaining privacy and public trust.
At the same time, the rapid rise of AI is introducing new risks that governance frameworks must contend with. Bedside Bluff: How Chatbots Sound Certain and Get Medicine Wrong, presented by Andrew Forde (KPMG), takes a critical look at how AI systems communicate confidence. Testing leading language models on thousands of medical exam questions, the session reveals a gap between how certain AI appears and how accurate it actually is. By examining underlying probability signals, it raises important questions about transparency, reliability, and the safeguards needed when deploying AI in clinical and decision-making contexts.
Alongside these challenges, new tools are also expanding who can meaningfully access and use health data. In AI-Powered Conversational Analytics Platform to Democratize Healthcare Data Through Natural Language Queries and Interactive Visualizations, Hariharasudhan Giridharan and Anmol Sidhu (Nova Scotia Health) showcase how generative AI is being used to translate plain-language questions into actionable insights from complex EHR data. Deployed across multiple facilities, the platform enables faster, more accessible decision-making, which illustrates both the opportunity and responsibility that come with democratizing data access.
These sessions reflect a broader shift in digital health, where growth is no longer just about more data or more tools, but about putting the right guardrails in place to ensure they are used safely, ethically, and effectively. As organizations navigate this balance, governance becomes less of a constraint and more of a foundation for meaningful innovation.
Explore e-Health26 programming
The Guardrails for Growth Track offers a closer look at how data can be leveraged responsibly across the health system. Review the full e-Health26 Agenda to find the sessions that align with your priorities—use the colour-coded filters to refine your view—and register for the conference if you haven’t yet.
