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Improving Care in the Long Term

Health Quality Ontario has just updated the information available on its website showing how well long-term care is being delivered in the province. It puts a fresh face on the largest, longest-running data collection and reporting system in Canada for quality of care information on long-term care homes.

With these homes having a resident population with increasingly complex care needs, the evidence suggests the quality of care provided to those residents is improving in many respects, but that more can be done.

Putting a Quality Lens on Health Technology

Dr. Joshua Tepper

A growing body of evidence from Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom is providing compelling evidence of improved quality outcomes as a result of using health information technologies (HIT), and Health Quality Ontario has identified HIT as an enabler of quality care.

Evidence from these jurisdictions has shown that electronic medical records and other forms of HIT can improve patient safety, improve patient outcomes and make providers more effective and efficient, as well as aid faster adoption of evidence to practice. These technologies can also facilitate quality care by providing better data on which to base clinical, policy and funding decisions.

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.

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