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Wait Times: A Metric to Watch

Dr. Joshua Tepper

Earlier this summer, Health Quality Ontario revamped its public reporting on wait times to make it more user-friendly. We also added reporting on the wait time between a specialist receiving the referral from the patient's family doctor, to the patient's first surgical or specialist appointment, to gain a fuller picture of the patient experience.

Since then, the data has been used on numerous occasions to document how well or badly one hospital is doing compared to the rest of the province. There have also been almost 100,000 page views of the wait times pages on the Health Quality Ontario website since their launch. Interest in the information remains strong and there were more than 13,000 page views of the nine wait times measures pages between mid-November and mid-December.

The Art and Science of Measurement in Healthcare

Dr. Joshua Tepper

(Join Health Quality Ontario CEO Dr. Joshua Tepper for a tweet chat to discuss this topic on Nov. 8, 1:30 pm ET)

At Health Quality Ontario we like to measure things. After all, data is the cornerstone of quality improvement. But are we measuring the right things? Are we measuring too much? How do we move from measurement to improvement? How do we involve professionals and patients in deciding what we measure? How does personal experience balance data?

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