Every time someone visits a doctor, fills a prescription or is admitted to hospital, a record is created. Multiply that across a lifetime and a country, and you have an extraordinary resource—in theory.
In practice, it’s a bit of a mess.
“We pride ourselves in Canada on having universal health care,” says Lisa Lix, “but that doesn’t mean that we have universal health data.”
Each province and territory runs its own systems, collects information differently and stores it under different rules. A diabetes record in Manitoba doesn’t necessarily look like one in Ontario. That makes it hard to answer questions that span the country. Questions like “is this drug safe?” or “is this disease becoming more common?”
Untangling that mess has been Lix’s life’s work, and it’s why she has been named the 2025 recipient of the Dr. John M. Bowman Memorial Winnipeg Rh Institute Foundation Award, the University of Manitoba’s top research honour. Awarded annually, the Rh Awards recognize UM researchers whose work has made major contributions in their fields.
A Distinguished Professor in the Department of Community and Global Health at the Max Rady College of Medicine, Lix holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Methods for Electronic Health Data Quality. Her work builds the tools that bridge those provincial gaps: algorithms that identify patients with specific conditions across complicated datasets, methods that let researchers compare apples to apples between jurisdictions and validation studies that tell decision-makers whether the numbers can be trusted.
