Building a culture of improvement… together. Over the past four years, AFHTO members have built a solid foundation of performance measurement in primary care. Individual teams have been translating this growing strength into providing ever-better care. AFHTO’s board of directors recognizes that it’s now time to do this across the AFHTO membership. This will help AFHTO and our members deliver on the promise of high-quality care for all patients. It will also advance our strategic priorities of demonstrating the value of team-based primary care and showing leadership across the primary care sector in Ontario. Here’s what you can do now:
- Last week, your team’s leadership triad received an email from Rob Annis, the President and Chair of AFHTO’s Board of Directors, inviting each team to help us select a set of common indicators for members to focus their collective improvement efforts on. We’re asking EDs and administrative leads to respond to this survey on behalf of their teams. Please talk to yours! Although we’re grateful to the 15% who have already responded, we would love to hear from some more. That way we can be sure we understand the entire membership’s priorities.
- We have an opportunity to get help, and possibly funding, to support this effort. Researchers at Queens University can help us dig deeper into the D2D data and turn it into a tool for collective improvement. Starting with D2D 6.0, we will be asking teams permission to share their anonymized data with the research team. Read here to learn more and talk to your board about saying “yes.”
Get ready! D2D 6.0 is (almost) here. The data-submission platform will be open from August 23rd until September 13th. But there’s no need to wait! All the tools you need to start gathering and compiling your data are available now. In response to member requests for more consistency, we’ve kept the changes to a minimum. Here are the small changes we’ve made:
- To reflect changes HQO has made to the myPractice report, we’ve changed several indicators so that palliative-care patients are now excluded from the calculation.
- With the help of your data, we’ve shortened the Team Profile section of D2D. Where we used to have 6 questions about 49 characteristics that enable quality improvement, we now have 1 question about 8 characteristics that your data showed us were particularly meaningful.
- We’ve added a question on high-dose opioid dispensing. Data for that indicator comes from the myPractice
To get started, check out our page of D2D planning & preparation resources; download your myPractice team-level report and your Cancer Care Ontario Screening Activity Report; and compile your patient-experience survey data. As always, feel free to contact us for help! Welcome, QIIMSs! Three Quality Improvement and Information Management Support (QIIMS) people have come on board to support Ontario’s 25 Nurse Practitioner—Led Clinics. We’re thrilled to welcome them into the QIDS Specialists community of practice. Registration is now open for the AFHTO 2018 Conference. Join us on October 24th and 25th for Relationship Design with Starfield in Mind.
- Read about this year’s themes here; there’s bound to be something for everyone.
- Are you looking for ways to get more from your EMR? Sign up for one of the Networking & Knowledge Exchange sessions.
- Are you a QIDSS, a QIIMS, or someone whose work is similarly focused on supporting measurement and QI in your team? You’re invited to join our QIDS Specialists’ networking session, one of 15 interprofessional networking sessions taking place at this year’s conference.
In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #76 or peruse other eBulletin back issues here!
D2D 6.0 Timeline

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