Managing Access to Your Electronic Health Record

What is the Electronic Health Record (EHR)?

Ontario’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) contains a secure digital record of individuals’ personal health information, which is made available electronically for health care providers to care for their patients. For more information, please visit Electronic Health Record Plain Language Description and List of Repositories that are Accessible by the Electronic Health Record.

Consent Directives

A consent directive gives patients (or their substitute decision makers) the option to restrict access to personal health information in the electronic health record. If you (or your substitute decision maker) do not want to the share health information with members of your health care team, you can restrict access by asking for a consent directive to be added to your EHR. If a consent directive is in place and a clinician tries to access your record, a notification that your record is blocked will appear.

Restricting access doesn’t stop your records from being updated, new information will continue to be added by your health care providers throughout your health care journey. You can choose to unblock your record at any time by submitting a new request. Once the consent directive has been applied, or removed, you will receive confirmation letter.

Ontario Health receives health information for the EHR from multiple health care providers across the province. As a result, certain types of health information may be held in more than one repository of the EHR. This means that applying a consent directive to the information in one repository may not limit access to this same information in another repository. For example, information about laboratory test results stored within the OLIS repository or medication information within DHDR may also be noted in a report in the acCDR repository (such as a discharge summary). This should be considered when making a request on the EHR Consent Directive Request form.

Consent Overrides

In accordance with the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), there are certain circumstances where a health information custodian may access information in the EHR which is subject to a consent directive. This is known as a consent override. The Electronic Health Record Consent Directive and Consent Override Policy outline the circumstances where an override is permitted.

Note that in some instances, a health information custodian may not have the technical ability to perform a consent override, and therefore may not be able to access the personal health information while a consent directive is in place, even if there is a significant risk of serious bodily harm to the individual to whom the information relates or to another person or group of persons.

Requesting to block or unblock access to your records in the EHR:

Complete our EHR Consent Directive Request Form and submit to Ontario Health Privacy Office.

For more details, please see the Electronic Health Record Consent Directive and Consent Override Policy and Procedure.

Ask a question or make a complaint

If you have questions or complaints regarding Ontario Health’s privacy practices, please contact us by visiting our Privacy Contact Page.

You can also contact us by fax or email:
Fax: 416-586-4397 or 1-866-831-0107
Email our Privacy Team using the contact form below. A full response will be issued within 30 days.