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CHHRN National Advisory Committee: Geoff Ballinger

Geoff

Geoff Ballinger manages physician information at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). He has been with CIHI since just after its inception in 1994 joining the organization after an eight-year career with Health Canada.

The first half of Geoff’s CIHI career was in leading the redevelopment of the Institute’s economic and financial information. For the past decade, Geoff and his talented and dedicated team have been developing and refining information on the largest component of health care—health human resources—with a focus on physicians. The team collects and analyzes data on the supply and distribution of physicians as well as the services they provide and the payments they receive. The results and the indicators from these analyses are shared publicly and are used to support physician fee negotiations between provincial medical associations and provincial governments; and, to support physician utilization research and resource planning.

Recent new strategic initiatives include the collection of detailed physician claims level billing data that can be linked to other CIHI datasets to support even more sophisticated products useful to decision makers. To further complete and advance our understanding of overall payments to physicians in Canada, CIHI is also collecting more detailed information on non-fee-for service payments and services that can be integrated with fee-for service information. 

CHHRN is very pleased to have Mr. Ballinger as a member of the CHHRN Advisory Committee and also as a member of the Canadian Health Workforce Conference Planning Committee, both of which benefit greatly from his knowledge, expertise, advice and invaluable support.

It’s important that we recognize that doctors directly and indirectly influence the utilization of nearly all categories of health care especially the largest—hospitals and prescribed drugs—yet, we don’t know as much as we could about the dynamics of those influences across the country. CIHI, with the support of efforts like CHHRN, is building the relationships, standards, data, tools and information to improve our knowledge about the vital contributions physicians make across the health care system and across Canada” -Geoff Ballinger