Digital Health News

In January 2015 the Centre for Family Medicine eHealth Centre of Excellence launched a new primary care project, QBIC: Quality Based Improvements in Care. Divided into two distinct but interrelated work streams, QBIC is based on the understanding that optimizing primary care’s use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is essential to supporting improvements in our health care system and achieving positive health outcomes at the patient, practice and population levels.

QBIC Stream 1 is focused on providing 85 primary care clinicians within Waterloo Wellington tailored support in quality improvement, chronic disease prevention and management best practices and information management. Participating teams from various organizational models will be provided with quality improvement coaches by Health Quality Ontario, chronic disease templates and indicators supporting best practice care, eHealth coaching tailored to their specific EMR, and be given the opportunity to provide input which will assist in advancing other eHealth initiatives both locally, provincially, and nationally.

QBIC Stream 2 will be taking a close look at the outcomes of a previous eHealth Centre of Excellence initiative, Project ALIVE (Advancing and Leveraging the Investment Value of EMRs). For nine months, Project ALIVE worked with two Waterloo Wellington family health teams to increase the clinical value of their EMRs and enable them to deliver quality patient care by enhancing the maturity level of their EMR use. QBIC Stream 2 will study the benefits associated with the work done by Project ALIVE and evaluate the impacts and results at both family health teams. They will also be developing materials that can be shared with other primary care organizations and how this can assist with the identification of at-risk patients in need of additional support i.e. through Health Links.