AFHTO members are leading the way to advance manageable and meaningful measurement across primary care. This work is critical. Around the world, cost-effective, high-performing health systems are based on a strong foundation of comprehensive primary care; robust measurement is a mandatory ingredient for strengthening that foundation.
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.
AFHTO has created a series of handouts that highlight some of the exciting results we have seen to date and illustrate how we got there.
- Patients as partners
- D2D Handout Algorithm project
- Conference Handout EMR CoPs
- Conference Handout 1 Impact Assessment
- Stay tuned for more!
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. Watch for the next iteration in January 2016.