About This Research Initiative

The Context

In the current fiscal year there is an initiative underway within three British Columbia Provincial Government Ministries (MCFD, MEIA, MLCS) to create an integrated case management system. This new system will collect, store and disclose the personal information of the clients of these Ministries’ programs, whether the clients are served directly or through out-sourced services operated by third party organizations.

The Key Issue

The core issue of concern to organizations in the sector is: Contracted service organizations are unprepared to consider, understand and be fully accountable for the legislative, ethical and procedural issues involved in owning, holding custody of, disclosing to third parties, and protecting the privacy of, client information that has such profound privacy concerns in the proposed integrated case management system.

The Province, through several different Ministries, contracts out over $1.8B in social, employment and health services each year, covering a wide range of service and organizational types. The planned integrated case management system represents a major change in the legal environment and procedures and protocols for the thousands of community and non-profit organizations across BC contracted to provide services on behalf of the Government of BC. The implementation of this new system will have many implications, including deeply complex systemic changes in the way detailed personal information on clients is managed, protected, and transferred to and from these Ministries by community organizations.

The Research Initiative

This initiative, as a preventive legal intervention, will mainly focus on providing accurate legal context, interpretation and analysis of handling of private personal information within the new integrated case management system. This will provide important and critical information for community organizations to conduct effective risk assessments of their procedures for managing client information and to make adjustments required under the new regime of information transfer.