Monitoring What Matters: Working Together to Achieve Change
I am delighted to announce that we have recently completed recruitment for our senior team.
These individuals and the entire team at Health Quality Ontario (HQO) are committed to working with others to improve the quality of health care in Ontario. In the weeks ahead, I will discuss many of the important initiatives that HQO is developing.
The first of these is Monitoring What Matters (PDF, 994KB), which I am pleased to share for your review and comment.
Monitoring What Matters (PDF, 994KB) will guide HQO’s future work in the area of performance monitoring and public reporting and help us answer important questions about the state of health care in Ontario. How is health care improving in our province? Why are some regions performing better than others? How does our health care system compare to others elsewhere in Canada?
Ontarians deserve to know the answers to these questions and providing them is a major part of HQO’s mandate, as outlined in the Excellent Care for All Act.
Looking back, there has been a substantial increase in the last few years in the amount of available data describing the quality of health care around the word. Growing up, I remember when Consumer Reports was mostly known for its ratings of products like stereo systems and cars. Today, it rates hospitals. The media has recently asked why we don’t do a better job of reporting on things like the success rates of fertility clinics or surgical outcomes – and others have highlighted the high rates of variation for different procedures. Similarly, many people in Ontario use sites like RateMDs to see what other people think of their doctor.
We all want more transparency and more information. But we need it to be accurate, and we need to make sure that the comparisons we make are fair.
Monitoring What Matters (PDF, 994KB) will help us to ensure that our methods are fair and our data is accurate. We are continually trying to improve our methods and the quality of the data we use to monitor the performance of the health care system.
Moving forward, our Monitoring What Matters (PDF, 994KB) strategy sets out a bold path. We know that health care providers, quality improvement champions, system leaders, patients and the general public all have important ideas and experiences to contribute to our work. We have already benefited from the input of many individuals outside HQO, including patients, as we crafted this strategy, but the public posting of this strategy reflects our desire to seek wider input. We want to hear from all of the voices touched by Ontario’s health care system, because when we work together we have the power to make our system stronger.
As HQO further develops and implements our Monitoring What Matters (PDF, 994KB) strategy, we will work hard to incorporate the ideas and opinions that we hear and weave the strategy throughout other initiatives at HQO – be it supporting quality improvement, advancing the best evidence to drive change system, and enhancing how we share information to help shape the system.