Optimize your practice

Quality improvement to optimize your practice

With your practice team’s specific needs and goals in mind, our practice improvement coaches are available to help clarify roles, establish structures, and make lasting improvements in areas like health technology, panel management, and team-based care. In addition to our team of skilled coaches, peer mentors bring clinical expertise and their direct experience to the support we provide. Physician and medical office assistant (MOA) peer mentors work with our coaches to provide one-to-one support directly in doctors' practices and co-facilitate learning opportunities.

If you’re thinking about ways to optimize your practice, our practice support team can help you get started. We use a quality improvement (QI) approach that’s flexible and tailored to your practice. We focus on:

 

  1. Setting goals
  2. Implementing changes
  3. Measuring results
  4. Assessing for improvement
  5. Sustaining successful practice change

Develop high performing primary care teams: Team-based care

Within our team, coaches with a specialized skill set and focus on team-based care (TBC) work with peers across the province to provide additional supports in the areas of leadership, conflict resolution, role clarity, communication, and team development. Coaches can also help primary care networks (PCNs) plan for team-based care and the impacts on physicians and teams in their community.

Designed for primary care teams in the process of implementing or already working in a team-based care environment, our team-based care learning series offers teams an opportunity to come together with our coaching support as you work toward becoming a high functioning team. Session order is flexible and designed to meet the needs of teams as you work to implement team-based care.

Click here to read about more team-based care supports.

Understand your patients' care experience: The patient experience tool

Use our patient experience tool to survey patients about their experiences and interactions with your family practice on topics such as wait times, office hours, coordination of care, and cultural sensitivity. Clinics can send the survey to patients electronically (email or SMS), or ask patients to complete it on tablets provided by FPSC's practice support program. Tablets typically rotate between participating clinics every six to eight months but can be available for longer periods for practices who choose to continuously survey their patients.

Practice team members access responses in real-time using an easy-to-use, web-based dashboard. Patient responses are anonymous, and are available only when a minimum of five responses per question are received. The secure platform automatically anonymizes and randomizes the responses upon receipt before the data is reported in the dashboard.

Data from the patient experience tool can inform your practice’s quality improvement activities. Our practice improvement coaches help physicians and teams to begin surveying patients, reviewing survey data, and implementing practice improvements. Physicians can use the data to inform quality improvement activities in practice. Practices can opt to share aggregated data with their local division. 

The patient voice can contribute to a family practice’s work to adopt the attributes of a patient medical home and to determine readiness to participate in a primary care network.

To get started, complete this online form. A PSP team member will connect with you to coordinate a time to deliver and set up the tablet and survey.

Learning opportunities in clinical & practice management topics

To help doctors and practice teams stay up-to-date on information and best practices in key areas of clinical and practice management, we offer a variety of flexible, evidence-based, learning opportunities. Our practice improvement coaches support doctors and teams to apply learnings and put theory to practice, paving the way for positive, sustainable change.

Learning opportunities are:

  • Short, flexible, and tailored to a practice’s immediate learning needs
  • Interactive to help physicians maximize the value of their learning time
  • Multi-modal (online, in-person, and/or blended) to work with physician schedules and learning preferences
  • Focused on themes of patient self-management, quality improvement, and team-based care

Practice management topics include:

Clinical topics include:

  • Adult mental health
  • Child and youth mental health
  • Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
  • Chronic pain
  • Diabetes
  • Heart failure
  • Hypertension
  • Palliative care
  • Substance use

Mentoring from your peers

Physician and medical office assistant (MOA) peer mentors work with our coaches to provide one-to-one support directly in your practice and co-facilitate learning opportunities, lending their experience and unique perspective to the support we provide. Whether you already know what kind of support you are looking for or want to learn more about how your practice might benefit, our team can help you.

If you're interested in getting involved as a peer mentor, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to peermentors@doctorsofbc.ca to get involved.

If you're interested in connecting with a peer mentor to support your practice, please submit a service request here.