Exploring CIHI's Information Resources

Overview

CIHI publishes a variety of information directly to their website.  You can search or browse for information resources and much of the content is also publicly available without creating a user profile and logging in.

A note about Core Plan subscribers

Your level of access to content and the cost of priced items differs based on whether you are affiliated with one of CIHI’s Core Plan subscribers, including institutions such as Canadian health care facilities and regional health authorities. As a university, Queen’s is not eligible to be a Core Plan subscriber. However, if you are affiliated with Kingston Health Sciences Centre, you may be able to benefit from its Core Plan status.

For more information about CIHI's Core Plan, visit Accessing Core Plan products and services or Contact CIHI.

Access Data and Reports

The Access Data and Reports tool provides access to available datasets, indicators, reports, interactive tools, and other resources.  Note that not all content findable by way of the Access Data and Reports tool is publicly available. For example, you may encounter descriptions of tools that are only available to Core Plan Subscribers, like Your Health System: Insight.

You can search using keywords, and filter your results by topic, geography, document type and format, and by date. Some important nuances of the search interface to keep in mind include:

• There is no advanced search interface allowing you to search specific parts of content descriptions, like the title.
• Search results will be returned if they match all your keywords, and there is no way to match either of two words without doing separate searches.  For example, a search for hospital clinic will return results matching “hospital” AND “clinic”, but you can’t perform a search to match “hospital” OR “clinic”.
• Some search results filters (found in the left-hand column) are mutually exclusive, while others are not.  For example, resources are assigned only one “primary theme” but may be assigned multiple “geographies”.
• Selecting more than one filter in the left-hand column will show results matching any of the filters, but there is no way to show results matching multiple filters at the same time. For example, selecting the “Yukon” and “Quebec” filters will show all results matching at least one of those filters (Yukon OR Quebec), but you can’t filter your results to show only the search hits matching both filters (Yukon AND Quebec).

CIHI’s eStore

Much of CIHI’s published content is free, but some is priced. CIHI has an online store (eStore) from which you can purchase priced products.  You will need to create a CIHI profile to do this. Some priced products from the eStore are available at no charge for Core Plan Subscribers.

Much of the content in the eStore can also be found using Access Data and Reports, but some content is unique to the eStore. Unlike Access Data and Reports, the eStore displays available products in an alphabetical list, which provides an alternative method for finding content.