Please share with other members of your team who may be interested. See below for more information on the following:

• HQO’s Health Quality Transformation 2015 accepting abstracts until July 30, 2015
• Ontario Patient Ombudsman: Encourage patients to participate in consultation by August 31
• Grant opportunity coming soon: Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Grant for IHPs and Physicians
• Primary Care participation needed:
  • Toronto Western specialists seeking family physician input on specialty referrals
  • Canadian Public Health Association – STBBI Stigma Questionnaire Pilot
  • Atrial Fibrillation screening study
  • Volunteer family physicians in Toronto needed for Yonge Street Mission

HQO’s Health Quality Transformation 2015 accepting abstracts until July 30, 2015

Submit an abstract or visit the conference website for submission guidelines. This is an opportunity for AFHTO 2015 Conference presenters to preview your presentations while increasing exposure for your initiatives (time and budget permitting).

Ontario Patient Ombudsman: Encourage patients to participate in consultation by August 31

The province is inviting the public to share their ideas on what skills, experience and personality traits they’d like to see in Ontario’s first Patient Ombudsman. Invite patients to participate by:

1. Reading Ontario’s First Patient Ombudsman.
2. Reflecting on their experiences, within the health care system, as a current or former patient, caregiver or decision-maker for a patient.
3. Share feedback online by August 31, 2015. The survey should take about 10 minutes.

For further detail and to participate please visit the website.

Grant opportunity coming soon: Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Grant for IHPs and Physicians

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF) Ontario Region has given advanced notice for its Fall 2015 Call for Proposals to be released in mid-August. IHPS and physicians working with breast cancer initiatives may be eligible for the Research Grants and Fellowship Programs. To find out more, please contact cbcfallocations@cbcf.org.

Primary Care Participation needed:

Toronto Western Specialists seeking family physician input on specialty referrals

“Unfortunately too often, as specialists, we are guilty of failing to adequately address the needs of our family physician colleagues in how we collectively care for our patients by providing consultation support, and we hope to remedy this.” As a result, Toronto Western Hospital internists are conducting a 5-minute survey in a bid to find new ways of providing consultation services to family physicians. They hope to use this information to inform a pilot program. For further details you can read the research proposal.

Canadian Public Health Association (CPHCA) – STBBI stigma questionnaire pilot

CPHA is seeking participation from front-line health and social service providers (including administration staff) who may come into contact with individuals living with or at risk of sexually transmitted and blood borne infections (STBBIs). Participants will be testing the Health and Social Service Provider Attitudes and Beliefs About People at Risk of or Living with STBBIs Questionnaire. For further details, please contact Rachel MacLean at rmaclean@cpha.ca.

Atrial Fibrillation screening study seeking primary care participation

Canadian Stroke Prevention Intervention Network (C-SPIN) is looking for primary care clinics interested in participating in a randomized trial investigating new technology for screening patients for early detection of atrial fibrillation (AF).  The trial is being led by Drs. David Gladstone, Noah Ivers, Russell Quinn and Jeff Healey. For further information, you can read this project summary or email Project Manager Alex Grinvalds at alex.grinvalds@phri.ca.

Volunteer family physicians in Toronto needed for Yonge Street Mission

Yonge Street Mission is seeking Toronto family physicians to volunteer with a health clinic for one or two afternoons a month. They work with youth ages 16-24 that are marginalized and who need access to doctors in a non-judgmental and safe environment. If interested, please contact Kristin Hersey, Volunteer Resources Coordinator at 416-929-9614 x 4284 or khersey@ysm.ca.  

Data to Decisions (D2D) 2.0 is here!

• Click here to review the overall results
• Click to access the interactive report
• Register for orientation webinars on Thursday, June 18 at 12:00 PM or at 4:30 PM (some spaces remaining at 12:00; plenty of room at 4:30)
• See why D2D Matters – watch the video for a family doctor’s perspective

D2D is a ground-breaking report on performance in team-based primary care in Ontario.

• AFHTO members are leading the way to advance manageable and meaningful measurement across primary care.
• This work is critical. Robust measurement is a mandatory ingredient for strengthening comprehensive primary care as the foundation.
• AFHTO members are keen to step up to show the value that primary care teams deliver to patients, communities and the health system.
• Teams can compare their results to their peers, however individual team results remain confidential to that team.

D2D 2.0 demonstrates significant progress in this journey:

• More than 100 family health teams and nurse practitioner-led clinics have voluntarily submitted their data.
• This gives insight into the care of over 1.7 million Ontarians.
• Comparative analyses indicate the results are representative of the full AFHTO membership of Family Health Teams (FHTs) and Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics (NPLCs).

The D2D journey is revealing how to get better at measuring what matters most:

• AFHTO members are shaping implementation of Health Quality Ontario’s Primary Care Performance Measurement Framework (PCPMF) – in identifying priority measures for system and practice level and in refining these measures.
• Working with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), AFHTO members are leading the way to measure the average cost of all health care received by the panel of patients served by each team, adjusted for the characteristics of that patient panel.  This measure is highly important since it:
  • Can be calculated for the panel of patients in any type of primary care practice in the province.
  • Enables cost to be monitored over time to better understand the impact of improvements in quality of primary care and the health of patients on the sustainability of health care system.
• To better reflect the many facets of comprehensive primary care that matter to both patients and providers, AFHTO members have completed their first iteration of a composite measure of quality.
• Working across such a large number of primary care teams is enabling innovation to simplify data extraction from EMRs and improvement in data quality.

D2D 2.0 shows encouraging results for AFHTO members and provides guidance for further improvement (click here for table):

• Overall, AFHTO members are performing better than the provincial average on same day/next day access (40% better), cancer screening (10% better), and patient satisfaction with their involvement in decision-making (4% better).
• There are preliminary indications that patient satisfaction with the courtesy of office staff has improved over the past 3 years (20% improvement).
• Most teams rank high on some indicators and lower on others. D2D enables teams to compare themselves to their peers and pinpoint their improvement activity.

The D2D journey continues. Measures will continue to be refined to become more and more meaningful to providers and their patients, and acted upon to improve care. Thank you to all AFHTO members who participated in D2D 2.0.  We hope you will all consider participating in the next iteration, to be reported in January 2016.

Over half of AFHTO’s membership has contributed data to D2D 2.0! June 18 is the report release date. Sign up for the webinars to learn how to navigate the report and see how you compare to your peers.  In the meantime, Executive Directors will be invited to complete a pre-D2D 2.0 survey. This survey will help AFHTO members measure, demonstrate and improve the impact of teams, the QIDS program and D2D on comprehensive, interdisciplinary team-based primary care. EDs – watch for a follow-up email. QIDS Specialists – a key force in advancing meaningful measurement – are the subject of a new video. Three minutes was not nearly enough time to showcase their complete range of skills and competencies, but it does illustrate a few of the ways they’re making a big difference. 

Check in with your QIDS Specialist to find out more about how they can help your team – or contact Carol Mulder for more information. For more information about D2D 2.0 you can visit the relevant page here in the Members Only section.