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Tweeting about quality: How social media can help improve care

Pat Rich

Informing and connecting: If social media is supporting the development of quality care in Ontario and elsewhere, it is through effectively performing these two key tasks.

While social media may still only be used by a portion of health care providers, policy-makers and patients in the province, the platforms we have come to associate with social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. – can be influential in supporting quality care initiatives.

In developing a system that we wish to be patient-centred, social media has emerged as an important platform for allowing patients and members of the public to engage with health care providers and policy-makers to make their views clear. The degree of interaction between those with lived experience with a disease or illness with those providing their care is unprecedented thanks to online communities and social media like Twitter.

The Twitter hashtag #metoomedicine, galvanized women physicians and their supporters through Twitter to demand more equity and gender equality within the medical profession and has helped bring a much higher profile to this issue. It is an example of how social media has emerged as a powerful tool for helping health care providers share their experiences and insights. It can also help providers deal with their challenges to support the fourth pillar of the Quadruple Aim in quality care – that of enhancing provider wellbeing (although to be fair, social media can also impede this by adding more time pressures to already stressed providers or exposing practitioners to frankly hostile or upsetting views or individuals).

Making Patient Engagement Meaningful and Measurable

(Join Health Quality Ontario CEO Dr. Joshua Tepper and patient advisors Emily Nicholas and Claude Lurette for a tweet chat to discuss this topic on Wednesday, September 27 at 7:00 p.m. (ET)).

Involving patients in the planning, delivery and assessment of health care is core to supporting high quality care. Involving patients helps us achieve patient-centredness which is one of the defining dimensions of a quality health system.

Last year, Health Quality Ontario released the province’s first Patient Engagement Framework to define a common approach for engagement across the province and guide people in planning for implementing and evaluating patient engagement activities across the health system from personal care to system-wide governance. Engaging patients at all levels is a relatively new process so such a framework is not intended to be set in stone and could evolve as more work is undertaken to understand the whole process.

But how does one make that engagement meaningful and how do you assess the impact of that engagement? How do we know engaging patients is making a difference?

Important Health Quality Insights from the Twittersphere

Dr. Joshua Tepper

That the patient perspective was mentioned first in our Twitter chat about quality in health earlier this week was both gratifying and appropriate.

Ditto the fact that a number of individual members of the public and patient advocates participated in the one hour #HQOchat, which represented the first time Health Quality Ontario has hosted a discussion on Twitter.

Quality care: Let’s Talk About It

Dr. Joshua Tepper

(On June 20, I will host a discussion on Twitter about quality and health care. This blog provides the context for that Tweet chat)

Most of us can recognize quality in clothes, cars or conversation.

But defining quality in health care delivery or in a health care system is not nearly as simple.

Let’s make our health system healthier

Join Our Patient, Family and Public Advisors Program

Patients, families and the public are central to improving health quality.


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