What previous experience does your team have with quality and performance improvement and continuous learning?
All of the organizations in our area have experience with Quality Improvement in both small and large scale improvements. We were the first partnership in the province to submit a Collaborative Quality Improvement Plan (cQIP) where we engaged clients and clinicians to redesign the care pathway for patients with COPD. We continue to engage patients and providers in this same way to redesign the care pathway and implement CorHealth’s Spoke, Node and Hub model for Heart Failure.
Our Core Partners have committed to continuing our collective contribution to a cQIP next year with a focus on our three priority populations.
Guelph and Area OHT core partners are committed to reducing clinical variation by providing care according to the best available evidence and clinical standards. This is evidenced by the implementation of standardized care pathways that have been implemented across the Guelph health system for several chronic diseases based on HQO quality standards e.g. Heart Failure, Stroke, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and opioid prescribing practices. There has also been strong uptake of electronic clinical order sets in hospital and standardized clinical templates within the EMR in primary care settings. Partners of our Core Planning Table have participated in other multi-organizational improvement with complex MH&A.
In addition, through all of the system-level integration efforts that have been implemented over many years of successful collaboration, a common thread has been a consistent, structured, approach to quality improvement. This includes creating a shared understanding of the current state, reimagining an improved future state, and developing a plan for how we will collectively close the gap. With work plans in place, many of our system improvement efforts have dashboards with outcome indicators that are monitored by inter-organizational steering committees to support continuous quality improvement and reviewed regularly by governors that are overseeing integration efforts at the system level.
Quality Improvement (QI)I education has been an ongoing focus within many of our Core Partner organizations with multiple staff doing training through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, IDEAS, BPSO champion training, and Lean. This investment has fostered the emergence of quality improvement leadership in many organizations, which has contributed to the successful implementation of both internal and community wide improvement projects. Ongoing quality improvement training is integral to a consistent QI approach and we will continue to focus and hone our capacity building efforts. Capacity for data analytics has been identified as a significant enabler to support our quality improvement efforts. To this end, the digital working group of the OHT is committed to providing meaningful and timely data analytics and has already begun meeting to form a vision and work plan to achieve this goal. As we move into this next phase of evolution, we are committed to focusing on a small number of initiatives for which we can confidently make transformative, sustainable change. We will leverage our expertise and success in QI work as we apply our approach to our Year 1 target populations and beyond to our full attributed population. In addition, we will build on our existing partnership with the University of Guelph to support the research and evaluation component of our OHT.