The North American Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (NAO) is a collaborative partnership of interested researchers, research organizations, governments, and health organizations promoting evidence-informed health system policy decision-making. Due to the high degree of health system decentralization in the United States and Canada, the NAO is committed to focusing considerable attention to state and provincial health systems and to creating a foundation for more systematic health system and policy comparisons among substates.
Featured
Newfoundland and Labrador:
A Health System Profile
(now available in PDF)
Recording Available: Promising initiatives for Emergency Department diversion: Insights from international approaches
Call for Papers:
Implementing Digital Health Tools in Canada; policy lessons & future focus areas (Deadline extended)
New Publications
- Canada and the Netherlands: Rhetoric versus Reality in the Evolution of Solidarity Underpinning Universal Health Coverage, University of Toronto Press
- Testing “the science”: A comparative analysis of COVID-19 testing policy across four Canadian provinces, Social Science & Medicine
- Success and failure in establishing national physician databases: a comparison between Canada and Israel, Health Economics, Policy and Law
- Political changes and healthcare in Canada (Editorial), BMJ
- Canada and the Netherlands: Rhetoric versus Reality in the Evolution of Solidarity Underpinning Universal Health Coverage, University of Toronto Press
- Resilience-promoting social networks among unpaid dementia caregivers: protocol for a mixed-methods, 2-year exploratory study, BMJ Open
- Network dynamics in public health advisory systems: A comparative analysis of scientific advice for COVID‐19 in Belgium, Quebec, Sweden, and Switzerland, Governance
New Book Chapter
- Canada’s health care system: the promises and challenges of a federated system in Research Handbook on Health Care Policy
In the News
- Access to Care with Christine Tizzard and Sara Allin, The Social (March 4, 2025)
Health System Profiles
Canada Health System Review (2020)
Mexico Health System Review (2020)
United States Health System Review (2020)
The North American Observatory is hosted at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. We wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.