Prior to April 2006, inequities in access to health knowledge resources existed across BC. Although it was widely recognized that safety, quality, effectiveness, and efficiency in the delivery of health care were linked to evidence-based practice, no plan existed to ensure that every health care provider across the province would have access to a common, equitable set of health knowledge tools.

In May of 2003, the CEO of the BC Academic Health Council (BCAHC) convened a meeting of library and administration representatives to review past and current efforts at a provincially coordinated licensing of health e-resources. The BCAHC is a federation of independent and publicly funded health care and post-secondary organizations in BC, as well as related Government ministries, and it functions primarily as a networking and facilitating agency. It coordinates and administers collaborative initiatives in order to optimize the effectiveness of relationships among health practitioners, health educators, and health researchers and their respective organizations.

Although several groups and individuals (e.g. the Health Libraries Association of BC, the University Librarian of UBC, and the Head Librarian at the then University College of the Cariboo) had previously developed proposals or discussion papers to address the disparities, it took the BCAHC championing the idea to give the needed momentum. This initial meeting was the inception of the current e-HLbc concept. Two and a half years later, in January 2006, the consortium Electronic Health Library of BC (e-HLbc) was formed to purchase province-wide access to selected resources (databases, indexes, abstracts, and full-text).