A decentralized identity and data sovereignty platform that enables First Nations citizens to control their health information—from credentials to clinical records—under their Nation's authority.
Every benefits interaction requires aligning an ISC status card number, a BC health care number, and Pacific Blue Cross member information. Name discrepancies, expired status, and address changes cause rejected claims and manual resolution. Citizens must translate between governance regimes using credentials none of which represent their Nation's authority.
Clinical records are scattered across nursing stations, community clinics, provincial hospitals, specialist offices, and pharmacies. A citizen who receives care in a remote community and later visits an emergency department in Vancouver arrives as a stranger to the system. No single view of their health record exists.
Conventional health IT assumes institutional custody of patient data. But First Nations governance requires the opposite: data custody must rest with the Nation or the individual citizen. Adding a patient portal to an existing system does not solve a custodial architecture problem.
Existing interoperability efforts rely on centralized EHR viewers and point-to-point integrations that never address the fundamental question: who controls the data and where it physically resides. Data Possession requires infrastructure the citizen or Nation controls—not a vendor's cloud.
Data is owned collectively by the Nation and individually by the citizen. Data stores must be governed by Nation-defined policies, not vendor defaults.
The Nation controls identity issuance. The citizen controls access permissions. A dual-authority permission model operating at two governance levels.
Citizens and Nations can access data regardless of where it was created. Cross-jurisdictional portability without bilateral data-sharing agreements.
Data physically resides in Nation- or citizen-controlled infrastructure. It must not transit or persist on servers outside sovereign control.
A First Nation issues digital membership credentials to its citizens as W3C Verifiable Credentials, using Decentralized Identifiers as the cryptographic foundation. Health service providers accept these credentials for eligibility verification at the pharmacy counter, dental office, and optometrist—replacing the current multi-credential alignment process with a single, Nation-issued digital proof.
After clinical encounters, care providers issue verifiable credentials summarizing the visit—diagnoses, medications, referrals, immunizations. Citizens hold these in their digital wallet and can present them to any provider. Clinical VCs use FHIR-aligned data structures for interoperability with the Canadian health system while maintaining OCAP® governance constraints.
Each citizen's health records are stored in a Decentralized Web Node—a personal, encrypted data store under the citizen's control. Care providers authenticate via VC, receive scoped access, and read or write clinical data. Nations can host DWN infrastructure for their citizens, ensuring data Possession under OCAP®. Offline-first operation with conflict resolution supports remote and low-connectivity communities.
British Columbia has deployed production infrastructure for digital credentials. BC Wallet is a live application for storing and presenting verifiable credentials, with open-source issuer tools available. Provincial pilots are underway across business registration, worker qualifications, and property ownership. The technology stack is proven—its application by a First Nation as identity issuer has not yet been attempted.
Bill S-5, re-introduced in February 2026, would require health IT vendors to adopt common interoperability standards and prohibit data blocking. A platform built natively on decentralized storage and verifiable credentials is architecturally aligned with what incumbent vendors are being forced to retrofit. Patient-controlled health data stores become a legitimate endpoint for health information exchange.
Governance framework design, credential schema development, and pilot deployment with one Nation for health benefits eligibility verification. Citizens present a single Nation-issued digital credential at the pharmacy, dental office, and optometrist.
FHIR-to-VC schema design, clinical workflow integration, and provider-side testing. After encounters, clinical summaries are issued as verifiable credentials that citizens carry in their wallet and present at any point of care.
DWN architecture with OCAP®-compliant permission models, offline-first design for remote communities, and privacy-preserving aggregate analytics for community health planning. Full data sovereignty from identity to records.