The main doctor of Ontario is asking for a national immunization program and a record to address the gaps exhibited by the resurgence of measles in Canada, but first, he says that his own province needs a centralized digital vaccine system.
The annual report of Dr. Kieran Moore, recently presented with the provincial legislature, says that a coordinated approach of all levels of government and the medical care system is necessary to keep the preventable diseases of vaccines at bay in the midst of an increase in the vaccine.
Each province and territory has its own immunization schedule and data system, but for more than 20 years, medical care providers and public health experts have advocated a national vaccine registry. Canadian pediatric society has also requested that vaccine schedules be harmonized throughout the country since 1997.
In his report, Moore said Ontario is lagging behind other provinces that have modernized their vaccine records, including British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba and Nueva Scotia.
This mosaic approach has led to confusion for parents who have become registration guardians, and leave public health officials in the dark when it comes to coverage gaps and inequalities in access, which makes it difficult to respond to outbreaks.
Moore said this has also made it difficult to monitor the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine, critical information as skepticism of the parents of routine immunizations doubled in Canada between 2019 and 2024. Children’s vaccination rates have also fallen since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Prevenible vaccines diseases are a continuous threat that can and will resurface if we lower the guard. A recent measles outbreak in Ontario unfortunately has highlighted the speed with which previously previously controlled diseases can be extended,” Moore said in the report.
Although BC has registered a little more than 100 measles cases as of July 5, neighboring Alberta has registered more cases than all of the USA. Despite having a fraction of the population. Dr. Susan Kuo, a doctor from the Richmond family, said the current outbreak could be prevented with updated vaccines, and Covid-19 pandemic had led to an increase in the skepticism of vaccines and the mitigation of poor diseases.
Dr. Vinita Dubey, a Toronto Associated Medical Official of Health, said in an interview last month that the process in her jurisdiction is outdated.
Parents monitor the immunization records of their children and must send them to the Boards of Public Schools in Toronto. This information is shared with Toronto Public Health, manually enter its own system and then send letters to homes that have not provided vaccine records.
“It is a very, very manual process. Our system itself does not talk to many other systems,” Dubey said. “And those are some of the ways in which it is really outdated.”
The Moore report said that the Canada Public Health Agency is working with provinces and territories to connect existing immunization records and develop a surveillance system for vaccine coverage.
As of October 2024, five provinces and one territory, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nueva Scotia and Yukon, have submitted vaccine records, according to the federal government’s website.
ONTARIO Currently stores vaccine records in three separate data systems: one for schools and child care centers, another for COVID-19 shots and a third party for billing claims of the Ontario Health Insurance Plan and electronic medical records of the doctor’s offices or community pharmacies.
Moore said the efforts of the Ministry of Health to link these data systems are encouraging. A ministry spokesman said Ontario is working to provide patients with a digital identity tool to access their personal health information, including vaccination records.
Moore said in the report that Ontario has faced challenges with the integration of data from several medical care providers without duplicating the tickets. Routine childhood immunizations are mainly administered by family doctors, unlike several other provinces in which public health nurses assume this role and the information is consolidated more easily.
There is also an economic advantage for a national vaccine schedule, since centralized acquisition would reduce costs through bulk purchase, reduce duplicate shots and preventable hospitalizations, according to the report.
