Enabling high quality care

AFHTO measurement efforts capture widespread attention

People across Ontario and North America are keen to learn about the ground-breaking advances AFHTO members are making to meaningfully measure primary care. AFHTO submitted nine abstracts to four major conferences, and all were accepted. See the slides and posters linked within the descriptions below.

Presentations on AFHTO members’ approach to the Starfield Principles:

  • Ontario data support Starfield’s theory on primary care quality and cost Evidence shows that quality can be measured according to what matters to patients, and higher quality in primary care is associated with lower costs to the health care system.
  • Making composite measures of primary care quality useful for front line providers A practical discussion about the use of composite measures by front line providers in primary care, informed by AFHTO members’ experience in using the quality roll-up indicator.

Presentations on approaching measurement that is meaningful to providers and patients:

  • Impact of a ground-up voluntary performance measurement initiative on the use of data for QI in primary care An exploration of how D2D has changed conversations around using performance data by framing measurement as a means to improving quality, not an end in itself.
  • Developing a more meaningful way to measure performance in primary care:the impact of getting started
  • Getting started with involving patients in improving quality Through evaluation of QI workshops involving patients and QIDS Specialists, barriers and enablers to patient engagement were identified and subsequently validated by care providers.
  • What do interprofessional healthcare providers need and want to get better at what they do? Interprofessional health care providers told us what support they need for quality improvement, identifying interprofessional collaboration and patient engagement as important enablers for quality in primary care.
  • Building a Mosaic: Using locally-gathered data to develop a province-wide program planning tool This presentation describes how, through the Schedule A Indicator Catalogue, AFHTO members have compiled and disseminated locally-developed innovations and evaluation indicators in order to drive evidence-based quality improvement initiatives which balance the need for local relevance with the need to demonstrate collective value and system-wide impact.
    • Poster presented at Health Quality Ontario's Health Quality Transformation conference.

Presentations on optimizing the use of EMRs for quality improvement:

  • Reduce, reuse, recycle: digging for gold in EMR data This presentation outlines standardized EMR queries developed by AFHTO’s QIDS Specialists and shows how they can help us move from “garbage in, garbage out” to “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
  • Feasibility and impact of using EMR to trigger automated patient experience surveying An observational study of 8 primary care teams who used an automated patient contact management system to survey patients by phone or email.
  • Moving the needle on diabetes care This presentation describes the AFHTO member-built Diabetes Care Composite Indicator, which employs standardized EMR queries to identify patients with diabetes and quantify the quality of care they receive according to a small number of evidence-based measures. With this tool, teams can evaluate their progress in a more accurate way that reflects the contribution of the entire team. This presentation was awarded Abstract of Distinction at Health Quality Transformation.