In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, the Ministry of Health rapidly deployed an authoritative, secure and privacy protected health data platform, referred to as the Ontario Health Data Platform (OHDP). 

OHDP is a hosted service through Queen’s University and was built from the ground up with a large computing capacity to support advanced analytics methods including machine learning. Datasets collected by the Ministry of Health through OHDP are pseudonymized meaning that privacy enhancing technologies including data minimization techniques, are applied to the datasets that are indirectly collected through legislative authority for secondary research use so as to protect the privacy of individuals and maintain the data utility required to support advanced analytics.