The eHealth Centre for Excellence (eCE) and Centre for Effective Practice (CEP) are partnering to support family physicians in the Waterloo Wellington LHIN. Through this partnership, family physicians are being offered both academic detailing (clinical education) visits and EMR Coaching visits on caring for their patients with chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP) and managing the use of opioids. 

Academic detailing

The academic detailing visits are customized educational visits with a CEP academic detailer (clinical pharmacist). An academic detailer will meet with the family physician in-person to discuss:

• Initiating patient conversations regarding treatment expectations
• Transitioning patients from acute to chronic pain management
• Mechanics of tapering and rotating opioid medications
• Accessing local non-pharmacological management options
• Preparing an exit strategy for opioid therapy trials

Visits are 30 minutes long and are arranged at a time and place that is convenient for the family physician.

This service is Mainpro+ accredited, voluntary, free-of-charge and free of commercial interest.

To find out more, visit https://thewellhealth.ca/academicdetailing/.

To sign up for an academic detailing visit, contact:

Anu Thind, PharmD, Academic Detailer

E anu.thind@effectivepractice.org

P 647-980-8147

EMR Coaching

The eCE is supporting the use of EMR tools that assist with CNCP and Opioid Management. A Change Management Specialist will meet with the clinician in-person or remotely to provide general EMR support, tool installation and customization, and training.

Coaching sessions are custom tailored to the clinician and organizational needs; group or individual sessions are provided based on clinic preference. To find out more, visit http://www.ehealthce.ca/EMR-support.htm.

To sign up for a Coaching visit, contact:

Stephanie Chin, Change Management & Health Systems IT Specialist - CDPM Stream Lead

E stephanie.chin@ehealthce.ca

P 519-722-2996

It’s official! The System Coordinated Access eReferral Program has expanded beyond Waterloo Wellington with soft launches in both the North East and Erie St. Clair LHINs. As of September 2018, North East successfully launched eReferral to Central Intake as well as their assessment centres, locally referred to as North East Assessment Centres (NEJACs). The deployment team plans to continue to expand the eReferral roll-out to include primary care and specialists in the near future.

But that’s not all! The Erie St. Clair deployment team has also been hard at work. Their soft launch not only included Central Intake but they also officially onboarded two Orthopedic surgeons who are already successfully receiving eReferrals from Ocean into their TELUS EMR.

Additional go-lives in Champlain and SE LHINs as well as continued roll-outs to primary care in all expansion LHINs, are planned for the coming months. The SCA Program team is committed to supporting the teams as we all continue to expand eReferral and celebrate successes. Together, we are making eReferral history!

Please click here to download the PDF.

On August 14, the Waterloo Wellington System Coordinated Access team marked a significant milestone—the one year anniversary of eReferral going live in the Waterloo Wellington region.

The initial launch of the eReferral solution was part of a proof of concept, which allowed providers to refer into Orthopedic Central Intake, Diabetes Central Intake and a number of diabetes education programs across the region. Since the initial launch, the eReferral program has expanded to four additional LHINs (Champlain, ESC, NE and SE) and seen significant expansion in WW with the onboarding of many new eReferral destinations, including all hospitals diagnostic imaging departments across the region, three orthopedic assessment centres and an ever-growing list of specialists and specialty services, which can be accessed at by clicking here.

Since going live in Waterloo Wellington...

• 7,500 eReferrals have been sent to 90 referral targets! These referrals were sent by over 220 unique referrers in our region
• The Waterloo Wellington Regional Coordination Centre has processed over 1,500 eReferrals through their Diabetes and Orthopedic Central Intake Service
• Wait time data shows that the wait 1 for orthopedic referrals has decreased by a mean of 21 days and 59 days for knee and hip, respectively
• After the introduction of imaging guidelines, the number of pre-consult MRIs ordered (which are not needed for knee osteoarthritis) went from 34% in early 2017 to 21.8% in early 2018, a 12% reduction
• Users have reported a decrease in the number of incomplete referrals received as well as promising efficiencies in their workflow when using the eReferral system. This has resulted in time savings of up to nine days when compared to the traditional paper-fax referral process.
• When the referral is complex, the time to send the referral by physicians (including data entry) was reduced using eReferral by almost three minutes (37.5% less)

eReferral Expansion is Underway

In addition to the work happening in Waterloo Wellington, four expansions LHINs (Champlain, ESC, NE and SE) have made significant steps towards implementing eReferral to support their respective MSK pathways. The NE LHIN was the first to go live with a limited release of the eReferral solution on August 14, 2018 with plans to gradually increase adoption over the next several months. The other three LHINs (Champlain, SE and ESC) are scheduled to go live in the coming months. The teams have been hard at work engaging their stakeholders and finalizing processes in preparation for launch. In addition to MSK, all four expansion LHINs, with the support of the SCA Program, have initiated discovery work to inform the early stages of planning for diagnostic imaging (DI) eReferral, which will build off the DI deployment underway in WW.

What a year! Congratulations to the entire System Coordinated Access team and our partners for the impressive accomplishments to date!

Since its launch in March 2018, a total of 40 primary care physicians have been registered for the virtual visits platform, VirtualCare!

The innovative solution offers new ways for providers to securely communicate with patients via chat messaging, phone or video call. Close to 1600 patients in Waterloo Wellington have been registered so far and over 1100 visits have been completed. Using the website or mobile app, patients can send a message or request a virtual appointment with their primary care provider to renew a prescription, discuss chronic condition(s) or new health issue/symptoms, and for health education among other reasons.

What does usage look like to date?

of virtual visits were initiated by primary care providers to follow-up on previous in-person appointments, discuss lab results and medication. 

of all virtual visits completed were conducted via chat messaging or phone call.

The year-long Proof of Concept, in partnership with the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), will be rolled out to additional physicians and nurse practitioners across the Waterloo Wellington LHIN by the eHealth Centre of Excellence (eCE), with the hopes of increasing capacity in primary care practices and improving the patient and provider experience.

Physicians participating in VirtualCare describe it as a user-friendly platform that allows them to easily answer questions and "see" patients for appropriate concerns, without them having to come into the clinic,  saving them both time and resources.

Some of the latest VirtualCare features:

• Patient self-registration
• Patient and Provider mobile app
• New role for NP’s and Delegates

If you are interested in signing up for virtual visits or looking for more information, please contact Meghan Brenner-Burgoyne (meghan.brenner-burgoyne@ehealthCE.ca) 

Please click here to download the PDF.

Coming up on Tuesday, August 28 from 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM, the QBIC (Quality Based Improvements in Care) team will be hosting a webinar with guest speakers Dr. Upe Mehan & Kate Harvey on how to use QBIC's new osteoporosis tool for primary care electronic medical records (EMRs).

For more on this tool, click here!

Registration link: https://goo.gl/forms/rLmOtBp12SbtOKho2

Webinar details: Tuesday, August 28th 11:30 – 12:30

Where:  https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/762210997

                 1-855-392-2520      -     Access Code: 9319738

Please click here to download the PDF.

Last year, the eHealth Centre of Excellence partnered with the Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network (WWLHIN) to conduct an evaluation on the benefits of the Health Links Approach to Care within its sub-regions through a series of case studies.   These case studies are available here!

We are delighted to share that this work was recently featured on Health Quality Ontario (HQO)'s Quorum site!

Click here to read the post.

What is Quorum and why should you sign up?

Quorum is a free open online community dedicated to improving the quality of health care in Ontario – together. It is a forum where members can collaborate to learn from each other, share experiences, and support innovation from idea inception through to meaningful improvement. For more information, please click here.

Please click here to download the PDF.