Background

The BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort (BC-HTC) was set-up as collaboration between BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), the Ministry of Health (MoH) and BC Cancer Agency in 2013 to monitor hepatitis disease burden and provide answer to pressing policy questions in British Columbia.

Design

The BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort (BC-HTC) includes all individuals who have been tested for HCV or HIV at the BC Public Health Laboratory or who have been reported to public health as a case of HCV, hepatitis B (HBV), HIV or active tuberculosis (TB) in British Columbia, Canada. The laboratory/public health surveillance data are linked with the BC Ministry of Health Client Roster, medical visits, hospitalizations, prescription drug data, cancer registry and mortality. The cohort includes a longitudinal linkage of records from inception (1988) of each dataset to 2015, with plans for annual updates thereafter. The resulting linked cohort includes data on more than 1.5 million individuals, about a third of BC’s 4.6 million population.