Ontario Cancer Data Linkage Project: “cd-link”

In the past, analysis of administrative data relevant to cancer in Ontario had to be conducted within a handful of secure physical locations, such as the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). While successful at preserving patient privacy and confidentiality, this approach was slow and expensive and was also unable to accommodate the necessary capacity for research in the province. In 2008, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Cancer Care Ontario and ICES established a joint initiative to create a new cancer data release mechanism called "cd-link." Making the data more widely available brings the creativity of the broader research community to bear on what can be learned from these data, and will attract new researchers into the field of cancer health services research.