Quality Improvement

• Handout on ethics and QI [Coming soon!]
• QI basics for preceptors [Coming soon!]

Online Resources

• Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI): Leading QI organization for healthcare in North America.  
• Health Quality Ontario (HQO): Provincial website with QI resources developed for physicians and healthcare teams to improve care.
• Fun 10 minute video by Dr. Mike Evans on QI use methodology we teach
• Sign up for HQO My Practice Reports to see how you are doing in your practice vs the provincial average

2020 Recipients

Congratulations to Dr. Shady Piedra AbuSharar on being awarded with the top ranked Quality Improvement project in 2020. His project is titled “Improving Pneumovax 23 vaccination rates among adults aged 19-64 with Diabetes Mellitus”.

2019 Recipients

2019 resulted in a two-way tie:  Dr. Sonam Maghera completed her QI project on: Deprescribing Benzodiazepines in the Geriatric population. Dr. Katlyn Trebuss & Dr. Laura Woo completed their QI project on: Enhancing consistent, effective use of opioid treatment agreements in a primary care setting.

The Ottawa Practice Enhancement Network (OPEN)

The Ottawa Practice Enhancement Network (OPEN) is Supporting Primary Care Practices in the Champlain Region to Optimize Care Delivery. The Ottawa Practice Enhancement Network (OPEN) is a learning collaborative of primary care practices engaged in quality improvement (QI) and focused on addressing care areas prioritized by each practice. The project was initiated by the University of Ottawa’s Department of Family Medicine to support Champlain region practices in optimizing care delivery. OPEN seeks to encourage a culture of inquiry and action-oriented scholarship that is responsive to regional needs, serving as a model of QI to Family Medicine trainees. The project provides practices with standardized, actionable data extracted from their EMR in a format that is easy to use. This data, along with supports provided by the program, is then used to help practices:

• Assess practice performance and inform QI priorities
• Identify patients who meet specific criteria and whom they may wish to consider for QI initiatives
• Track progress on indicators targeted by the practice over time

Canadian Practice Information Network (CPIN)

The Canadian Practice Information Network (CPIN) is a primary care practice tool that addresses the pressing need for infrastructure and mechanisms to engage patients across the small independent primary care practices where they receive most of their care and care coordination.

The CPIN system has adapted software that has already been adopted by over 5500 physicians and compatible with over 10 different EMRs across the country. Through CPIN primary care providers can target specific patient groups to share short messages, such as flu shot availability or extended opening hours, by email or text messaging, and collect data on patient experience through an embedded survey. The CPIN outreach messages and survey questions are selected by the provider and targeted to all, a randomly selected, or purposively selected group of patients. Patient reported data, collected through CPIN, is de-identified, collated, and reported back to the provider, along with quality improvement (QI) tools, to enable providers to complete QI activities and earn their continuing professional development (CPD) certification credits.

CPIN’s distinguishing features from traditional patient experience data collection are that 1) it is a patient engagement and survey platform which offers providers and patients value with outreach messages from the provider to improve patient care and experience and promote better response rates from patients, 2) it creates minimal burden on patients, providers, or practices, and is designed to alleviate some work flow burdens and, 3) it ensures timely and high quality data collection and feedback driven by and responsive to the needs of primary care providers yet continually shaped by patient feedback.  CPIN can easily adapt its sampling to ensure adequate representation of specific patient population groups including ones traditionally poorly captured such as those who do not attend a practice regularly or linguistic minorities.

CPIN outreach messages can be created by the practice or draw on a library of messages created by team members or other users.  Outreach messages can share links to health information resources such as public health updates or prevention campaigns.  CPIN has a library of short 5-8 questions patient survey templates in English and French, covering topics such as access, continuity of care, and communication, derived from the TRANSFORMATION research programme.  These mini surveys aim to assess the pillars of the Patient Medical Home Model to support practice audit by primary care providers and the increasing demand for practice audit driven CPD.  The last question on each survey asks for patient feedback on what measures we should be using to evaluate their experience to allow the CPIN system to continually be shaped by input from patients.

Are you engaged in a QI activity in your clinic?

We would love to hear about it - Big or small, tell us what you are working on! Contact yr1dfm@uottawa.ca.