This article originally appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of the Ontario Medical Review magazine.
Useful supports that enhance practice efficiency
Quality improvement (QI) is any improvement to your practice that helps enhance practice efficiency and simplify administrative tasks. By enhancing workflow efficiency, you gain more time for yourself, preserve clinical resources and reduce your financial burden, while enhancing patient care.
“Don’t be afraid of quality improvement,” said Dr. Chandi Chandrasena, chief medical officer of OntarioMD. “It can make your life easier and save you time and resources in your office. The end result is that it gets you home sooner to family, loved ones or just dinner.”
Whether it be a personal initiative to advance your practice management or you’ve been selected for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s QI Program, OntarioMD can help with your QI needs.
Here are five useful supports:
This online self-administered survey from OntarioMD allows you to assess your current EMR use and make improvements to your practice. Questions cover practice management, information management and diagnosis and treatment support. Once completed, the assessment uncovers gaps in practice workflow, efficiency and patient care and generates printable charts to view results and progress. The evaluation process is the starting point for working with OntarioMD staff or peer leaders to help you prioritize achievable practice improvements, hold focused conversations with EMR vendors and guide staff discussions about practice efficiency.
OntarioMD provides tools and support to manage your practice and patient population health more effectively. This saves time and resources when you can’t figure out these workflows on your own. The i4C advisory service team offers physicians personalized QI coaching and support, helping you optimize your OMD-certified EMR and integrated digital tool use, identify care gaps and improve practice efficiency. Physicians can also leverage support from OntarioMD’s regional practice advisors, EMR technical specialists and peer leaders to tailor digital solutions that meet physicians’ unique practice needs and goals.
By using an EMR to directly access provincial systems and other useful digital health tools, you have a streamlined gateway to comprehensive and up-to-date patient information to provide efficient, informed patient care. Leverage your EMR and these integrated tools to fuel QI for your practice. The latest tools you can use from your EMR are the Digital Health Drug Repository, giving you access to drug and COVID-19 vaccination information, and eForms, offering access to digitized common Ontario Ministry of Transportation forms. These tools join other integrated solutions, such as the Ontario Laboratories Information System, eConsult, and OntarioMD’s digital report delivery solution and Health Report Manager or HRM®.
As part of its OMD Educates online learning series, OntarioMD hosts accredited webinars on QI best practices. Diverse topics include practical QI using your data, maximizing your billing, QI solutions to improve your workflow, managing your patient population, practice efficiency and leveraging dashboards. Attendees also participate in breakout room discussions and Q-and-As with QI experts.
Alongside the University of Ottawa’s Department of Family Medicine and the Office of Continuing Professional Development, OntarioMD is participating in this new, practical QI course for family physicians, specialists and their teams, and those working on their CPSO QI/QA practice improvement plans. The course, which began in February, is being offered three times in 2022, in three three-hour sessions.
Contact OntarioMD to get connected to any of these QI resources or learn more by visiting the website.