TrustSphere – a secure connection to your health

Canadians want to manage their own health and wellness care journey. This project aims to empower Canadians through the creation of a scalable and trustworthy health access platform that enables each person to utilize a strong digital identity to easily view, share and manage their own health data in a private, secure and informed manner — easy for patients and trustworthy for providers.

TrustSphere is a project funded by the Canadian Digital Technology Supercluster, the University of British Columbia and Mitacs. The TrustSphere consortium is made up of a number of partners including: researchers at BC Children's Hospital Research Institute, The University of British Columbia, and technology partners from Careteam, Secure Key, IDENTOS and Smile CDR.

TrustSphere is developing a new platform called the BC Children's Hospital Care Hub. The platform will allow users to easily and securely share confidential information through online health-care services, in compliance with rigorous health-care industry and public standards of privacy protection. Patients will control the sharing and access to the information they deem sensitive and will be able to choose what data can be shared with whom, for what purpose, when, where and for how long.

Patients will benefit from better health care and easier access to fulsome health information that will provide cost-efficient and effective care, eliminate duplication, reduce gaps and improve overall care quality.

Health ministries, health-care organizations and hospitals will be able to harness the power of digital health and reap the benefits of improved information, tools, risk management and fewer operational challenges for getting information.

The pilot phase will start with children in B.C. with Type 1 diabetes (TID) with the goal of expanding to the rest of B.C. and Canada. The next phase will bring in other patient clinical groups and include expansion to markets outside Canada over time. 

Primary Use Case

The BC Children's Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) TrustSphere Pilot will assess the ability of the BC Children's Hospital Care Hub to provide the benefits of data-driven health care, in the hopes that it will empower patients to improve how they manage their health, wellness and care journey.

Click below to learn more. 

BC Children's Type 1 Diabetes TrustSphere Pilot – Use Case

Diabetes is a common childhood life-long disease. Research shows that even with new technology, children living with diabetes are not meeting recommended treatment targets — for example, their blood sugar control is poor, especially in teenagers. Why? It might be related to how we deliver care. Many children living with diabetes use technology like glucose sensors and insulin pumps allowing them and their health-care providers to view data coming from these technologies that can help treat their diabetes. But, this information is often located in different online places, requiring different usernames and passwords, hampering access. Many parents also worry their child’s data isn't safe.

My Care HubThe BC Children's Hospital Care Hub (Care Hub) is a new digital tool, created within the TrustSphere project, that will solve problems of digital trust and multiple usernames and passwords. It will make it easier for patients and providers to share information in person or virtually via a dashboard where important data can be seen in one place. Care Hub's first version has been developed in partnership with health-care providers, researchers, companies, and children/families living with diabetes. It will be tested with 50 children at the BC Children’s Hospital Diabetes Clinic. Through Care Hub, children and their parents will also have the option to share their diabetes information with researchers, so they can play a role in making new discoveries.

We want to make sure that Care Hub works for all children living with diabetes and supports research that is truly important to them. This project will test Care Hub with children and families in BC so that we can understand which factors might make it hard to use Care Hub (like where you live or how much money you have). We will also do research to find out if using Care Hub improves blood sugar control and quality of life. We will bring people living with diabetes together with clinicians and researchers to make sure Care Hub supports diabetes research that really matters to patients.

We believe that effectively co-designed digital health tools that serve patients, families, health-care providers and researchers will advance progress to optimize clinical (A1C, time in range) and patient-reported (e.g., quality of life) outcomes in children living with diabetes. 

TrustSphere's BC Children's Hospital T1D TrustSphere Pilot will evaluate feasibility and usability of the first version of the Care Hub platform in a pilot study at the BC Children's diabetes clinic (Jan–Sept 2022). The results of this pilot will generate: (i) Care Hub version 2.0 that has been co-designed and piloted with users; and (ii) a tested process and structure for patients/families to consent to data transfer for research from Care Hub to the TrustSphere Research Registry.