New Article Feature: Child and Youth Chronic Physical Health Conditions in Ontario

A new publication led by Grace Golden and Dr. Graham Reid, and co-authored by AYM member Dr. Li Wang, aimed to develop an algorithm to identify children and youth with chronic health conditions (CHCs) using administrative health data, compare its agreement with parent-reported data, and identify variables related to agreement.

The authors used data from the 2014 Ontario Child Health Study, linked with Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) administrative health data.

The team found that prevalence estimates of CHCs were higher in administrative data than in parent reports, and that agreement between the two sources was poor. CHCs were less likely to be captured by administrative data in older children compared to younger children. Additionally, agreement between sources varied across different CHCs.

The results of this study suggest that there are significant differences between administrative and survey data related to CHCs. The authors emphasize that when examining questions about chronicity, it is important to consider algorithms developed from multiple datasets to capture a more complete and accurate picture of children and youths’ CHCs. Future work should validate the algorithm by comparing it to existing algorithms and integrating other data sources.

Check out the paper, “Child and youth chronic physical health conditions: a comparison of survey data and linked administrative health data in Ontario,” published in BMC Pediatrics in October 2025.