Here's a scenario every benefits leader has heard from an employee, if not lived themselves. A new specialist visit starts the same way it always does, filling out the same intake form, repeating the same medical history, explaining the same diagnosis to someone who has never seen the file. The care exists. The provider is qualified. But the system asks the patient to do the work of connecting the dots.
After supporting millions of healthcare consultations annually across government programs, national insurers and large employers, we see this pattern constantly, and it isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a structural gap in how care is designed. Nearly all Canadians affected by chronic conditions know the feeling. In fact, 85% report having to repeatedly share their medical history across providers, and 81% say managing their care makes day to day life more complicated.
We've spent the past several years building toward a different model, and along the way we've learned a lot about what it actually takes to make health data follow the person instead of the provider. Here's the framework we use, the proof it works, the lessons that surprised us, and where we think this goes next.
A Passport, Not a File Cabinet
The fix for fragmented care isn't another point solution. It's infrastructure. Health information should function as a portable health passport, a single, secure record that follows the individual across providers and care settings, rather than living in disconnected systems that never talk to each other.
A true health passport rests on a few core principles. The record has to be standards based, built on shared data formats rather than proprietary formats that only one vendor can read. It has to be bidirectional, meaning information flows both into and out of Maple's platform rather than just accumulating in one direction. It also has to be invisible to the patient, who shouldn't need to know or care what system is underneath, only that their history shows up when and where they need it to.
When information moves with the patient instead of staying locked in a single provider's file cabinet, three things change immediately. Duplication decreases, because no one has to re-explain a history that's already documented. Referrals improve, because the receiving provider has real context, not a blank slate. And care becomes more precise, because decisions are based on a complete picture rather than a single snapshot.
What This Already Looks Like in Practice
This isn't a future state we're describing in theory. It's running today, across two provinces at meaningful scale.
In Nova Scotia, Maple's virtual care service is deeply integrated with the province's Need a Family Practice registry and its 811 health line, so a visit on Maple connects into the same system provincial health leaders already use to track access and match patients to care. Visit and outcomes data feeds provincial reporting, which means a Nova Scotian's care history isn't stranded inside Maple, it's part of the same picture the health system is using to plan.
In Prince Edward Island, Maple's Unaffiliated Virtual Care service is integrated directly with the Health PEI Patient Registry. When a patient without a family doctor books a visit, Maple checks against the same registry the province uses, so patients are matched and tracked consistently rather than starting from zero with every new encounter.
"Neither of these integrations was simple, and neither happened overnight," said Abbey Sanford, Senior Manager, Client Success, Health System Partnerships at Maple. "But they prove the model works outside of a slide deck. Data can move between a virtual care provider and a public health system in a way that makes the experience better for the patient and gives the system a clearer picture, not a murkier one."
What Building This Has Actually Taught Us
The biggest lesson is that interoperability isn't a single integration you complete once. It's an ongoing practice. Every province, every registry, and every health system structures its data differently, governs access differently and moves at its own pace. What worked as a data adapter for one province's registry often needed to be rebuilt, not copied for the next.
The technical work, the APIs, the data adapters, the standards alignment, is necessary but not sufficient on its own.
"The harder work is aligning the integration, provincial health authorities, registry owners, and clinical governance teams, around a shared understanding of what data should move, when, and why," Sanford said. "Technology can build the pipe. It can't force two organizations to agree it should exist."
The third lesson is the one that changed how the team talks about this internally.
"What looks like invisible back office plumbing is often the single biggest lever for the employee experience, bigger than adding another point solution ever could be," Sanford said. "Patients don't feel the API. They feel the difference between repeating their history for the fifth time and having a provider who already knows it."
Where This Goes Next
Inside Maple, standardizing how Maple generated health records are structured and shared is a priority. The goal is to build this passport principle into the platform itself, so that every visit, every record, and every data point is structured from the start to move cleanly into the systems and providers a patient touches next, rather than needing to be retrofitted later.
Zooming out, we expect the connected data layer to become the foundation that makes AI genuinely useful in care navigation, rather than a feature bolted onto an app. AI agents built on connected, structured data can personalize recommendations, flag risk earlier, and match patients to the right specialty pathway faster, matching people to precision care instead of routing everyone down the same generic path. None of that is possible if the underlying data is still siloed.
And for employers, we think interoperability is quietly becoming a real evaluation criterion, not a nice to have. The organizations already asking vendors "does your platform share data with our other providers" are the ones who will be ahead of the curve when this becomes table stakes rather than a differentiator.
The Standard to Hold Vendors To
For employers, the promise of more portable health data is a future where employees spend less time repeating their histories and more time receiving care informed by what came before. Industry standards for healthcare data could help make that future possible by creating a shared foundation for exchanging information between organizations that adopt them. Realizing that potential will take continued work on technology, partnerships and governance across the healthcare system.
Good care isn't just about how many services are available. It's about whether those services function as one coherent system for the people relying on them.
Speak with a member of our team about how connected data and infrastructure can turn your existing benefits ecosystem into a genuinely integrated care journey for your employees.