About Us

The Pan-Canadian Document Ontology Initiative establishes a shared, practical standard for naming and categorizing clinical documents exchanged between Canadian health systems and electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Built on the international Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) Document Ontology and informed by mature implementations in British Columbia and Ontario, the project reduces administrative burden, improves clinician usability, and enables interoperability, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) DocumentReference alignment, and artificial intelligence (AI) readiness.

Vision and Objectives

Vision

A Pan-Canadian, LOINC-based document classification system that is:

• clinically intuitive,
• interoperable across jurisdictions,
• flexible for local implementation,
• sustainable and governed collaboratively.

Objectives

• Reduce administrative burden for clinicians and medical office assistants (MOAs)
• Enable consistent document exchange across provinces and vendors
• Support FHIR DocumentReference.type
• Provide a foundation for AI training, retrieval, and summarization
• Avoid reinvention of document taxonomies by each jurisdiction

Scope

In Scope

• Classification of documents sent between health system entities such as clinical information systems, EMRs and repositories
• Constrained set of LOINC codes with display names and part names modified for Canadian vocabulary (French and English) and medical system function
• Editorial Guidelines to explain the modifications and restrictions
• Implementation Guide for health systems and vendors, including expectations of senders and receivers of documents

Out of Scope

• Replacing local proprietary document taxonomies
• Full automation of document coding