Measuring and reporting for learning and improvement
NEW:
August 3, 2011: CIHI surgical procedure rates in Saskatchewan now on Quality Insight:
The Canadian Institute for Health Information's rates in our province for hysterectomy,
Cesarean section, cardiac revascularization, coronary artery bypass grafts, percutaneous
coronary interventions, and hip and knee replacements are now available on the
Quality Insight website.
July 20, 2011: More Acute Care Patient Experience Survey results have been added
to the Quality Insight website. Twenty more indicators from the ongoing patient survey
are now available at www.qualityinsight.ca.
All survey results will be updated monthly. See the
news release.
June 2011: While there are a lot of data available on discrete encounters with the
health system, there is currently no way to answer the following questions: How does
a person with a health problem travel through the health care system? Which services
do they access and in what order? What is the relationship between patient characteristics
(age, sex, etc.), the services they are using, and health outcomes? Answering these
questions will allow the health system to better understand how episodes of care
are related, track changes in the use health services over time, and more accurately
determine the cost of treating a condition.
The Health Quality Council, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of
Saskatchewan, is currently developing an Episodes of Care research methodology to
answer these questions for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease care, which will
allow aspects of care for other diseases to be studied using similar strategies.
A poster on this innovative
work was presented in June 2011 at 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.
May 29 - June 1, 2011: Rosemary Gray, Program Director, presented a
poster entitled Measuring. Learning. Improving. Indicator development and transparent
reporting for health system improvement in Saskatchewan at a national
eHealth conference in Toronto.
May 24, 2011:
Quality Insight wins award - Interactive Media Awards has recently chosen
Quality Insight as Best in Class from among 138
entries in the health care category.
February 17, 2011: Quality Insight,
a new online reporting tool that provides easier access to information on the quality
of health care in Saskatchewan, was launched at news conference in Regina.
Audio recording
of our January 25, 2011 webinar about Quality Insight online, including questions
from participants and answers by our special guest Dr. Ross Baker. He is an HQC board
member, faculty member at University of Toronto, and author of High performing healthcare
systems: Delivering quality by design.
PowerPoint slides from
the webinar.
--
Transparent reporting on the quality of health care is nothing new in Saskatchewan
(see timeline on measurement
and reporting in our province). The Health Quality Council (HQC) has over the past
six years released reports on a variety of care areas as "one-time" comprehensive
reviews of the status of a particular care or health service area at a particular
point in time. In 2008, HQC released its first
Quality Insight report as a starting point toward a more comprehensive look at
the quality of care in Saskatchewan. A second
Quality Insight report was released in the summer of 2010.
HQC and its health system partners -- the Ministry of Health, the Saskatchewan Medical
Association, the health regions -- have acknowledged for some time that to adequately
understand the current state of health care quality, assess the impact of improvement
efforts, and determine whether we are holding the gains, Saskatchewan needs to move
from "one-time" reporting, to a program of continuous measurement and reporting.
Such a program must also provide health system stakeholders with information on quality
in ways that are most useful and meaningful to them.
Also on this page:
Provincial measurement and
reporting infrastructure and new reporting mechanism
Quality Insight 2008
Quality Insight 2010
Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative provides impetus
Work in establishing a provincial measuring and reporting program was accelerated
when the
Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative set system-wide objectives for providing Sooner,
Safer, Smarter care across the
surgical care spectrum. Our health system needed a way to track progress on these
shared goals, and a
transparent, user-friendly way of presenting data to those who work in health
care, and to the public. Leaders and providers guiding the Surgical Initiative commissioned
HQC and a working group involving representatives of health regions and government
(Quality Insight Working Group) to coordinate the development of a provincial measurement
and reporting infrastructure, and to develop a mechanism for reporting on those indicators.
Infrastructure
The Health Quality Council and the Quality
Insight Working Group are in the process of creating a slate of indicators that
will allow the health system and the public to track the progress of the Saskatchewan
Surgical Initiative. Some of the indicators have been reported at the health region
level for some time and appeared in the 2008 and 2010 Quality Insight reports (e.g.,
the Best Possible Hospital indicator from the Acute Care Patient Experience Survey).
Others are reported publicly elsewhere and will be made available on Quality Insight
(e.g., surgical wait times) and other indicators will be reported publicly for the
first time (e.g., self-reported functional outcomes of people who have received hip
or knee surgery).
Reporting Mechanism
HQC is leading the creation a web-based reporting tool that will be a one-stop-shop
for information on the quality of care in Saskatchewan. We have named the tool Quality
Insight. On the new Quality Insight online, you will see the Saskatchewan Surgical
Initiative indicators listed under the headings Sooner, Safer, Smarter and you will
be able to sort quality of care data using a range of filters. You will be able to
create charts and tables that show your facility or health region's performance over
time, and you can compare your results with another region or to Saskatchewan as
a whole as a way of gathering information on who you can talk to regarding potential
best practices for improving care.
The suite of indicators that will be available on the Quality Insight web site initially
is a sketch that will be filled in, as more data become available, to paint a more
complete picture of the quality of surgical care in Saskatchewan. Eventually, the
palette of indicators will be expanded to include updates on indicators previously
reported on in the 2008 and 2010 Quality Insight reports, and new indicators that
reflect the performance of the broader health system overall.
We will continue working with our partners in the health care system to determine
how Quality Insight online can be expanded to further support their efforts to improve
the quality of care in Saskatchewan.
New!
A Citizen's Guide to Health Indicators
This publication (January 2011) from the Health Council of Canada provides an introduction
to health indicators, what they are, where they come from, and how they can influence
health care decisions and policies.
Quality Insight 2008
Quality Insight report,
2008 (PDF, 92 pages)
Quality Insight 2010
Quality Insight 2010 (PDF,
13 pages)
Quality Insight
2010 detailed data tables and figures for all indicators
Technical Appendix 2010
(PDF, 158 pages)
News release
For more information, contact Rosemary Gray: (306)668-8810, ext. 116 /
rgray@hqc.sk.ca.
