Alberta Health Services Datasets

The DAD provides demographic, administrative and clinical data from acute inpatient care and day surgeries. When a patient is recovering from an illness, injury or surgery, they receive short-term care through hospital-based acute care. While this is the primary focus of the data capture, some inpatient rehabilitation, long-term care, mental health visits have been captured over time. 

Category: Administrative data

Capture Focus: Hospital visits

Availability: April 1, 2002 - Current

Updated: Monthly (1 month delay)

NACRS collects demographic, administrative, clinical and service-specific data for emergency departments visits, day surgeries, urgent care visits and other ambulatory care or specialty clinic visits. Please note: specialty clinic reporting is a mixture of accuracy, completeness, and availability. This information does not have collection standards and is not mandatory to report across the province. Prior to 2010, the name of the database changed from AACRS (Alberta Ambulatory Care Reporting System) to NACRS based on data collection requirement revisions.

Category: Administrative

Capture Focus: Ambulatory care

Availability: April 1, 2001 – Current

Updated: Monthly (1 month delay)

The Practitioner Claims database contains information about service utilization of physicians and their patients as well as payment information. This data is collected through claims submitted under an Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan or AHCIP. Billings capture multiple levels of provincial care from inpatient to primary care services. 

Category: Administrative data

Capture Focus: Service utilization based on claims submitted under an AHCIP

Availability: April 1, 1993 - Current

Updated: Quarterly (4 month delay)

The PLD captures all general lab tests performed across the province sourced from both inpatient and outpatient labs. These tests include most clinical chemistry, toxicology, hematology, serology, urinalysis, and immunology. 

All PLD data is compiled using different systems to compile lab data from different municipalities within Alberta. There are four collection systems: Millennium (ML) – Calgary; Sunquest – Edmonton and Fort MacMurray; Labfusion – Medicine Hat; Meditech – Aspen and Chinook Peace Country. 

Category: Administrative

Capture Focus: Laboratory test results

Availability: April 1, 2012 - Current

Updated: Daily (1 week delay)

The PIN database includes pharmaceutical and drug dispensations data collected from community-based pharmacies across the province to inform a patient’s active and previous medications. PIN also includes allergy and intolerance information, pharmacy care plans, access to drug monographs, drug decision support, dispense information and the ability to create prescriptions and manage warnings. 

Category: Administrative

Capture Focus: Pharmaceutical records

Availability: January 1, 2008 - Current

Updated: Weekly (1 week delay)

Vital Statistics contains records that pertain to live births, stillbirths and deaths occurring within the province of Alberta. For births, data about the date, sex, location, kind of birth (e.g. twins), birth order, gestation, birth weight and demographic information on the mother are recorded. For deaths, demographic information as well as the date, location, cause of death and autopsy information are collected.

Category: Administrative

Capture Focus: Varies based on the specific registry (see below)

Availability: 

• Vital Statistics - Birth Registry: 1983 - Current

• Vital Statistics - Death Registry: 1983 - Current

Updated: Annually (1 year delay)

The Provincial Registry provides demographic and geographic information from basic medical and hospital care claims. Data is collected from all eligible residents in Alberta with Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP) coverage. The number of registrants can be used as a base for population counts.

Category: Administrative

Capture Focus: AHCIP registrant and plan information

Availability: April 1, 1994 - Current

Updated: Annually (1 year delay)

SCM is an electronic medical record (EMR) or clinical application that is exclusive to the Calgary area and contains patient health records (e.g., patient demographics, test results, orders, and clinical documentation). It is essential that the patient identification is accurate since many other systems share this information.

Category: EMR

Capture Focus: In-patient EMR data from the Calgary zone CIS Millennium

Availability: 2011 - Current

Updated: Daily (no delay)

Epic Systems Corporation, or Epic, is a privately held healthcare software company - one of the largest health system providers in the world. Alberta has enlisted the service of Epic to develop a common clinical information system for province-wide use through Alberta Health Services called Connect Care. Connect Care is a common clinical information system (CIS) that will allow healthcare providers a central access point to patient information, common clinical standards and best healthcare practices. Currently, there are a number of different clinical information systems in use within AHS facilities. AHS plans to consolidate these various information systems under this new, unified system. Connect Care is scheduled to be fully implemented by late 2022.

Category: EMR

Capture Focus: a single, unified AHS provincialCIS collecting EMR data

Availability: Varies

Updated: Daily (no delay)