Health System Integration and Sustainability Improving Ontario’s health care system
Noah Ivers, Women’s College Hospital
Ontario Healthcare Implementation Laboratory
Issue
Research has shown that not all
patients get the best possible health care. This means that even when doctors
are doing what they think is best, some patients end up less healthy than they
could be.
Health Quality Ontario (HQO) wants to
help doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals provide better care
so that all Ontarians are as healthy as possible. One way that HQO does this is
by providing doctors with information about how their practices compare to
those of other doctors, and research has shown that providing this kind of
feedback can lead to improvements in care. However, the size of these
improvements depends on how the feedback is presented, and what additional
tools or resources are available to the doctors and their patients. It is not
known whether these improvements last, or whether people will eventually slip
back into their old ways of doing things.
Project
As Health Quality Ontario continues
to send feedback to doctors around the province, there is an opportunity to
test different methods of maximizing these kinds of improvements in care. HQO
also helps with programs to make sure that the province’s health care system
pays for health care that matches what patients need, when they need it. If the
province pays for best practices, known as ‘quality-based procedures’, more
people in Ontario should get the right care, at the right place, and at the
right time. This would make Ontarians healthier and might also save tax
dollars. However, sometimes shifting to quality-based procedures can fail to
work or can have unwanted effects. It’s important to carefully study how these
programs affect health care.
Our team of health care providers,
patient partners, and researchers from Ontario and beyond, are working with
Health Quality Ontario to study and improve their programs and are supporting
HQO in the development of a world-class program in patient-centred quality
improvement. Our research will help to ensure that the Ontario health care
system works better for Ontarians, and will also help health care systems from
around the world learn from Ontario’s example.
Patient engagement
The investigative team is using a
number of approaches to engage patients in every aspect of the project:
Our team includes the Director of Patient Engagement at Health Quality
Ontario, who facilitates the involvement of patients and caregivers throughout
the project.
The research team also has the benefit of an investigator who has lived
experience with the health care system (i.e. a patient-investigator) and
experience working with both HQO and Patients Canada, a patient-led,
patient-governed organization dedicated to bringing the patient voice to
healthcare.
We are working with HQO’s Patient, Family, and Public Advisors Council
to capitalize on their prior work.
The project team has partnered with Choosing Wisely Canada, who have
worked with numerous patient groups to develop evidence-based patient
materials. These materials will be refined with further input from patients
representing vulnerable groups and disseminated as part of the study
interventions.
