Big IDEAs About Health Data: Homelessness in Health Administration

About the Presentation
In this session, Lucie Richard and Diana Ridgeway discuss how to use identifiers of homelessness in health administrative data. The presentation provides an insightful overview of improvements in data quality, validation of case definitions and best practices for using homelessness identifiers.

About the Speakers
Lucie Richard is a Senior Research Associate and Adjunct Scientist at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital. Her research examines health and health care disparities driven by social determinants of health, with a focus on homelessness. Lucie led the creation and validation of a method to identify homelessness within Canadian health administrative databases, which is increasingly used across Canada to describe and assess the health and health care patterns of patients experiencing homelessness.

Diana Ridgeway is a Program Lead with the Population Health department at CIHI. Her work focuses on leveraging Canadian health administrative data to provide insights on inequalities in health outcomes and health systems. Diana has contributed to several publications about homelessness using health care data. She has also contributed to CIHI’s Health Inequalities Toolkit and other educational products.

About the Series
The Big IDEAs About Health Data Speaker Series features a variety of experts discussing how data can be used to advance health equity. It aspires to create a space for conversation about whether and how data can be used to advance equity in Canada; specific uses of and guidelines for the use of disaggregated data (sex and gender, race and ethnicity, disability, income, housing, language etc.); and advancements in data research practices and methods that embed inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility in algorithms, distributed analytics, community involvement and equity assessment tools.

Land Acknowledgement
We respectfully acknowledge that HDRN Canada is located on the traditional and unceded territories of the ʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, whom we acknowledge as the traditional owners and caretakers of those lands.