On September 29th, the IPC/Ontario held that PHIPA governs and provides a right of access to “raw data” about an identifiable individual. It also held that raw data is not subject to the right of access unless it can reasonably be severed from the repositories in which it is retained. The IPC said:
Having regard to the evidence before me, I conclude that where the extraction of the complainant’s information can be done through the development of conventional custom queries by hospital staff, based on information in reporting views available to the hospital, the complainant’s information can be reasonably severed for the purpose of section 52(3) of the Act. The hospital’s obligation to provide access to this information, if the complainant wishes to pursue it, is met by providing him with the results of such queries. The information need not be in native format, but can be in the format in which those results are generated through such queries.
“Reporting views” are tools that make generating certain types of reports from databases easier. The IPC has suggested that hospitals must provide access to data that can be extracted based on such tools together with “conventional queries”. Hospitals can charge a requesters a fee that represents reasonable cost recovery.
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