LHIN sub-region planning is underway across the province. You may or may not have been invited to participate yet. The good news is you don’t have to wait! AFHTO has been reaching out to LHINs in various ways to increase their awareness and interest in the great work teams are doing. Now is the perfect time for you to jump in and lead the conversation. Get your team to get together with your sub-region peers and follow-up with your LHIN. This document outlines some key messages and resources to help you with this.
Measurement
AFHTO members are already measuring performance, with nearly two-thirds of members voluntarily contributing to D2D, now in its 5th iteration. We have learned a lot about what measures are important to patients and primary care providers, and what it takes to collect and report data for these measures.
Quality improvement and decision support capacity
AFHTO-member teams are well-equipped to lead. With our 35 QIDSS and nearly 20 QIDSS-like folks across the province, we’ve got a strong cohort of QI leaders. Through EMR communities of practice that include vendor representatives, our members have also developed strong networks of support for the major EMRs used in primary care.
LHIN-level and sub-region-level performance
AFHTO members already have generated LHIN-level performance data. Some members have taken the additional, proactive step of compiling their D2D data to generate sub-region performance reports. If your peers are interested in this, AFHTO staff can help you assemble these data so you don’t have to do it manually. In the next iteration, teams will have the option to identify their sub-regions so they can generate these summaries on their own, as they do for other peer-group summaries in D2D.
Definition of Quality
AFHTO members track quality in a way that reflects what matters to patients and providers. The D2D composite quality indicator describes quality in a more holistic way than is possible with individual “body part” measures such as blood sugar levels or cancer screening.
Higher quality means lower cost
AFHTO members have demonstrated that higher quality care is related to lower healthcare system cost, exactly as Barbara Starfield, pre-eminent primary care researcher, predicted based on her observations of the same phenomenon in international health system comparisons.
Sub-region partnerships
AFHTO members are already working in and learning from their experiences of partnerships, some of which mimic the sub-region areas. QIDSS partnerships are one example. Another example is Health Links – all of them include FHTs and/or NPLCs, and 22 of them (over 25%!) are led by AFHTO member teams.
Governance and leadership
AFHTO is committed to developing leaders and amplifying their voice. Through regional networks, peer mentorship, and sharing of locally-developed resources, our Executive Directors, clinical leads, and board directors are collectively strengthening their knowledge and skills and equipping themselves to be leaders in the field. We’re building on this foundation by providing tools and training to support best practices in governance and operations.
Leave a Reply