ABSTRACT
The government of Saskatchewan funds a health care system whereby each resident in the province, regardless of his or her ability to pay, is entitled to a broad range of health care services. The government pays for health care on behalf of each resident. Under some programs, the resident has little or no direct cost; for other programs, the resident is responsible for a portion of the cost. As a result of these programs, large data bases exist that contain information on outpatient prescription drug use, hospital separations, physician claim data, and cancer cases for a population of about a million people. One feature that helps make these databases so valuable for such things as pharmacoepidemiology is the unique identifier assigned to each individual and used by all databases. The Saskatchewan Prescription Drug Plan is one of the newest health programs in the system and has been in operation since September 1975.
