Tag: eBulletin

In this issue

• Transitions in Tilbury
• Help with patient surveys and QIPs
• Developing a tool to help manage patients with dementia
• More tools to help you keep getting better

Transitions in Tilbury

Last month, we shared the resources from Focus on Follow-Up, which included lots of innovative projects from our teams in the North East. But great things are happening all over! In case you missed Tilbury’s conference presentation, you can check out the slide deck here. In a hurry? Watch the trailer below. Want evidence that timely follow-up saves lives and makes our health system more sustainable?

• Check out this article, published last month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
• Watch Falling Through the Cracks: Greg’s Story. This short film tells the true story of Greg Price, a young man who died of testicular cancer after falling through the cracks in Alberta’s health-care system. It’s become a teaching tool for medical students at the University of Calgary. Wide release is coming this spring, but you can watch it online on January 24^th as part of HQO’s Quality Rounds.

Help with patient surveys and QIPs

Just in time for QIP season: A new tool that can automate your patient surveys and help you build your 2019-20 Quality Improvement Plan. We know that patient experience surveys are a great source of data, but we also know that distributing them and gathering the data can be time-consuming and difficult. HQI is a brand-new patient engagement & quality improvement tool from Cliniconex that uses your EMR to automate the process. It sends out patient experience surveys after they visit your team, then gathers and analyzes the data for you. Its dashboard function lets you track your performance over time and compare your aggregate results with your peers. HQI can also help you move from measurement to improvement. It allows you to spend less time gathering and formatting your survey data and more time developing QI initiatives. As you look at your data, it takes you step-by-step through the process of recording your insights, goals, and change ideas, and it turns these into a quality improvement plan (QIP) using Health Quality Ontario’s QIP template.

• Want to know more? Check out this sneak peek of HQI that was shared with “the Q” – QIDSS, QIIMS, Data & Quality Coaches, and QIDSS-like folks – on a webinar back in December.
• Want to see if your team fits the profile? Schedule a follow-up session for your team. Email sales@cliniconex.com or call 1-844-891-8492.

Developing a tool to help manage patients with dementia

Are you a family physician who assesses patients with dementia? Maybe you wish you had better tools to support you in this work, or you have ideas about what would make such a tool great. Here’s a chance for you to share these ideas and help create some tools that will make it easier for clinicians like you to make good assessments! Researchers at Queen’s and Ryerson Universities and Bridgepoint Active Healthcare are developing an eLearning platform for dementia assessment and management. To help them get it right, they’re conducting focus group sessions with clinicians from January through March. You’ll only need to attend one session, no longer than two hours, and you’ll receive an honorarium to offset the costs of travel and taking time away from work. There’s also an opportunity to participate remotely if travelling to Toronto or Kingston would present a barrier. Want to learn more? Ready to sign up? Email Lorraine Pirrie or Carolyn Steele-Gray. Or call Carolyn at 416-461-8252 x 2908.

More tools to help you keep getting better

Our partners at the Excellence through Quality Improvement Project (E-QIP) are presenting a series of webinars to support your team’s QI efforts. See below for times, dates, and links to register.

• ENCORE WEBINAR: Primer on Governance & Leadership of Quality Improvement – key messages for boards. Thursday, January 24, 10:00-11:30am.
• Enhancing joy in work for professionals through healthcare improvement with Dr. Chris Hayes. Tuesday, February 5, 11:30am-12:30pm.
• Sustaining your gains: A discussion on challenges of sustaining QI success & preventing the risks of short-lived improvements. Thursday, March 21, 12:00-1:15pm.

In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #82 or other back issues here!

Questions? Comments? Connect with the QIDS team at improve@afhto.ca.

In this issue

• Following up on follow-up
•  Introducing a council for the community of “Q”
• Building together: How to become a high-performing team
• Deferring the next D2D report

Following-up on follow-up

First, thank you to the over 50 people who braved the snow and shared their stories about follow-up in Sudbury at the end of November for Focus on Follow-Up. Second, thanks to our generous sponsors, OpenLabs (who developed Patient Oriented Discharge Summaries), LifeLabs, and CognisantMD, for making the event possible. Thanks also to our partners at the North East LHIN, the North East Ontario Hospital Network (NEON), Health Quality Ontario, and OntarioMD for participating and learning along with us. Finally, thanks in advance to you, for doing your part to pick up and spread what we learned together there:

• We learned how patients can be a part of the solution to their own follow-up through Patient-Oriented Discharge Summaries (PODS);
• We learned that one of the big advantages of signing up for HRM is getting notified about admissions RIGHT AWAY through e-notifications, even if there still might be a delay in getting rich info about discharges;
• We learned how teams can access local hospital information systems DIRECTLY and automatically to get important information about what happened with their patients there;
• We learned how pharmacists make a huge difference in follow-up, even from a long ways away!
• We learned about interprofessional approaches, such as multi-disciplinary appointments, that are already working in AFHTO-member teams.

To get more details on these and other helpful tips for improving follow-up, check out all the slide decks and resources here. Or maybe these stories will inspire you to tell your peers how you are doing follow-up to keep your patients from falling through the cracks after they leave hospital. AFHTO’s board has identified follow-up after hospitalization as a priority for 2019. It’s also an important way for primary care to respond the issues of hospital overcrowding and “hallway medicine” and finally, it will be a focus of the 2019-20 QIPs. So, let’s work together to show what we’re already doing for follow-up and maybe even make it a little bit better!

Introducing a council for the community of “Q”

It started with seven QIDS Specialists who first came together at the AFHTO conference in 2013. Five year later, the distribution list for the QIDSS community of practice is 60 strong. The QIDSS were joined first by QIDSS-like folks, then Quality Improvement and Information Management Support (QIIMS) staff from the NPLCs, and most recently E-QIP data and information coaches. They’re now a robust, mature community of QI workers and leaders, collectively known as “The Q.” They have built a large collective body of knowledge and a strong network for resource-sharing and peer support. AFHTO’s emerging culture of measurement is thanks in large part to them. Now, they’re taking a big step together on their own: Over the next few months, they’ll be electing a council of peers to serve as leaders and advocates for their own community of quality. Nominations are now open. If you think your Q is the B’s knees, encourage them to put their name forward!

Building together: How to become a high-performing team

Join us in March for a deep dive into what makes teams, your teams, work, and learn how to make your team even better. This workshop will explore the nine dimensions of high functioning teams identified by Dr. Judith Belle Brown, Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Western University. It will focus on the dimensions that your fellow teams told us they find most important in achieving high performance. You’ll leave the workshop with concrete ideas that you can use to make your team even better. This workshop is for every member of a primary care team. Everyone is welcome, from the official to the unofficial leaders, the clinicians and the clerical staff and everyone in between. Team-building happens from the bottom up and the top down and from every other direction as well. The workshop will be held twice – in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 6, 2019 and in Toronto on Friday, March 8, 2019. We’ll share more details soon but mark your calendars now! Practical support for the research and funding for the workshops has been provided by our research partners at the Centre for Studies in Family Medicine, Western University, through the INSPIRE2-PHC program funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. We look forward to seeing you – and your team – there!

Deferring the next D2D report

In light of changes to QIDS program funding, AFHTO’s board has decided not to produce D2D 6.1 this winter as originally planned. Instead, AFHTO’s QIDS program staff will be focussing on getting even more value from the measurement work AFHTO members have done. They will be doing deeper analysis of the existing D2D data (including the qualitative data from the QI enablers study), expanding team characteristics data and finalizing research partnerships to ensure ongoing analytic support for D2D, regardless of how QIDS program funding unfolds.

In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #81 or other back issues here!

Questions? Comments? Connect with the QIDS team at improve@afhto.ca.

Halloween is done.  Conference 2018 is done.  It’s time to get back to demonstrating the value of the work primary care teams do every day! Based on member input, AFHTO’s board chose ‘follow-up after hospitalization” as a priority for improvement across the membership for the coming year. This bulletin highlights activities that might help in that regard. Focus on Follow-Up in the North East: Scared of having your patients fall through the cracks? Join us in Sudbury on November 27^th for a full-day, interprofessional workshop for teams (and hospital partners) in the North East LHIN.

• Focus on Follow-Up will help your team make concrete progress in three areas: getting hospitalization information, tracking follow-up in EMRs, and doing the follow-up in a patient-centered way.
• As always, we’ll be highlighting the wisdom of the field, so you’ll hear what’s already working for your peers in the North East, and how you can do it in your team.
• Learn more, or go straight to registration!

Patient Oriented Discharge Summaries (PODS): It’s been a year! It’s time to check in about how well they’re working and why. The PODS research team is sponsoring the upcoming Focus on Follow-up session for AFHTO members (see above). Please help thank them by giving them 3 minutes of your time to complete a post-implementation survey of primary care teams. Sound familiar, but you’re not quite sure?  Read on …

• The questionnaire asks whether you’re sharing PODS with patients who go into hospital and/or getting them from patients when they come out of hospital. It also asks whether your team finds PODS helpful when it comes to doing follow-up.
• PODS, introduced in 2017, are a tool that can help your patients get the information they need when they leave hospital. Twenty-seven hospitals across Ontario are giving PODS to patients at discharge.
• Think you’ve seen this survey before? You may have done the original, baseline survey when PODS were first implemented. That survey helped the research team understand the potential value of PODS for primary care. This follow-up survey (see what we did there?) will help the measure the outcome of the intervention.

Use your Schedule A to help track progress with follow-up (among other things):  Follow the North Star to make your Schedule A more useful tool. Or consider reviewing the Program Performance Measures Catalogue (PPMC) to find more meaningful and consistent measures for your Schedule A.  More consistency shows measurement maturity, further demonstrating the value of teams to the MOHLTC.  If you’re not ready to redesign your Schedule A yet, maybe you would consider at least sharing the current version of your Schedule A.  This will help us update the catalogue and make it more useful.

• More information on PPMC: Here’s an introduction to the tool and how other teams are using it. And check out the quick reference guide for a cheat-sheet that will help you navigate it. You may also want to consider using program-planning and evaluation tools developed with and for AFHTO members.

Congratulations to everyone who presented at the AFHTO 2018 conference! We’re especially proud to toot the horn of our QI professionals – QIDS Specialists, QIIMS, and other QIDSS-like folks, now collectively known as the Q. Missed their presentations? Check out the links below. You may want to borrow some of their ideas for your own measurement and quality improvement work.

• Improving Quality Together
• Stop banging your head against a wall: how to measure, discuss, and improve timely access to team-based primary care
• Team-Based Transition Management – A Hospital Discharge Follow-Up Process
• The North Star – Leading the Way in Collective Action
• Thinking outside the box: Applying Lean tools in primary care
• When Things Aren’t Adding Up, Start Subtracting! De-Prescribing Sedative-Hypnotics
• Working together: A multi-organizational partnership to support pain management and opioid prescribing in primary care teams

For these slides and more, visit our website here.

In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #80 or other back issues here!

Questions? Comments? Connect with the QIDS team at improve@afhto.ca.