The authors review their 30 years' experience in determining the best research applications for routinely collected data from ministries of health, education and social services. They describe the rich research opportunities afforded by 40 years of data on health – i.e., every patient contact with hospitals, physicians, drugs and more – from the problems encountered in convincing an academic journal that meaningful findings could be culled from information collected on paying bills and tracking patients, through studies on education (enrolment, grades, standardized tests for grades 1 to 12), family characteristics (residential moves, marital formation and breakdown, number and timing of births) and social services (welfare recipients, children taken into care, protection services offered children in the family). They also detail how and why the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy was founded, and how it has continued through multiple ministerial, deputy and government changes.
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