Trust Built In: How Toronto’s IDENTOS is Powering PEI’s Citizen-Centred Digital Health Revolution

In the smallest province in Canada, a quiet digital revolution is taking place, one that could reshape how Canadians access and control their health and government data. And at the heart of that transformation is IDENTOS, a Toronto-based company that’s helping Prince Edward Island build a modern, secure, citizen-first digital infrastructure.

Founded in 2014 and led by CEO Mike Cook, IDENTOS specializes in digital trust, offering governments and health systems the technical foundation they need to ensure privacy, security, and user control across complex systems. While many vendors sell siloed, single enterprise focused solutions that struggle to scale across different departments or sectors, IDENTOS approaches the challenge from a citizen’s perspective: how do we make accessing and controlling sensitive information like health records simple, intuitive, and secure?

In PEI, the company is doing exactly that. Working with provincial partners, IDENTOS is enabling a digital front door for public services—starting with healthcare. This is underpinned by a system that gives Islanders the ability to access their own information, manage consent for data sharing, and receive services in a way that complements in-person support. The user experience was co-designed with communities, and the infrastructure includes everything from identity verification, secure login and access to health data, built on top of open technology standards, such as  FHIR.

“Too many systems were built around institutional needs rather than citizen expectations,” said CEO Mike Cook. “Our goal is to flip that model. We’re building infrastructure that makes trust, privacy, and access seamless, and puts individuals at the centre of their own data experience.”

For a province like PEI, the benefits are significant: better patient outcomes, faster access to services, and a transparent system that gives people real control over how their information is used. With built-in capabilities like data sharing, family or caregiver delegation and revocable granular consent, the IDENTOS platform is raising the bar for public-facing digital services.

But this is about more than one province. PEI’s work with IDENTOS is aligned with national trust frameworks and interoperability goals set out by Canada Health Infoway, setting the stage for broader digital transformation across the country.

The promise? A Canada where digital services are not just secure, but usable. Not just compliant, but compassionate.

And made, of course, by Canadians.

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This article is part of CCI’s new “By Canadian Innovators” series, which showcases how members of the Council of Canadian Innovators work with homegrown companies to fuel their growth and make Canada more prosperous. Each story in this series highlights the unique contributions of these companies to building a more prosperous, innovation-driven economy. To learn more about the companies CCI works with to build a more prosperous Canada, visit our member directory.