Other Areas Canada

Canadian Demographic Data

Canadian demographic files can now be found in our Synthea International repository: https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea-international/tree/master/ca

Overview

Health care in Canada is mostly a provincial responsibility, the provider files from Canada would need to be derived for each jurisdiction of interest. How to get these files will depend on the province(s) you are wanting to simulate and might be obtained through the health agencies of each jurisdiction or through organizations that maintain health-related data repositories.

Zipcode and demographics file

The Canadian equivalent of zipcodes are postal codes. Canada post offers a Postal Code latitude/longitude data technical specifications for purchase. This information is also available in the Postal Code Conversion File (PCCF), maintained by Statistics Canada, which links postal codes to census areas and allows for the creation of a Canadian demographics file (in addition to the zipcode file). Many Canadian research institutions have site licenses to use this file for teaching and/or research purposes. Check with your library (or other person that might work with this data) to see whether this is available to you.

The PCCF file comes with extensive documentation and code to process the raw files. Many postal codes occur multiple times, the SLI (single link indicator) to map a postal code to a representative point. The goal of your synthethic patient population may determine exactly how you translate the PCCF into your zipcode file and demographics file.

Resource for a starting point of Canadian csv data that has been used to successfully generate records