Dr. Barney Truong’s clinic is committed to advancing the Patient’s Medical Home model and one of the first steps to starting this work was implementing processes to clean up their panel. He says this initial effort has paid off,
“It’s hard to know how to provide services to your patients if you don’t know who your patients are. It allowed us to do things like outreach for routine screening and help limit the duplication of service to our patients.”
Next, Dr. Truong was drawn to
CII/CPAR’s many advantages, including better communication, better coordination between healthcare providers, increased patient and provider satisfaction, and improved patient outcomes. He further recognized that CII/CPAR could fill a fundamental gap Alberta Netcare. Although most of the healthcare in Alberta is provided by primary care, most primary care providers cannot add their valuable patient information to Netcare.
Dr. Truong is a member of Mosaic Primary Care Network and the clinic expressed their interest in CII/CPAR to the PCN. A PCN practice facilitator walked them through the key prerequisites which include, having Netcare access, being panel ready, and having an up-to-date Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). Dr. Truong’s clinic was using an EMR that was conformed for CII/CPAR and fortunately had an up-to-date PIA. To help clinics with this step, resources are available through the
AMA and the
Alberta Netcare learning centre.
After meeting the prerequisites, Dr. Truong and his team completed CII/CPAR implementation training. Most of this training involved learning about where data was being pulled from in the EMR. Dr. Truong and his staff found that the training didn’t take long to complete and ensured everyone in the clinic was consistently entering data correctly.
The clinic then completed the forms needed to go live on CII/CPAR. Dr. Truong says he found some of the forms long and a bit confusing, but with the help of their PCN practice facilitator, he was able to complete them in a couple of weeks and the clinic was given a go-live date (i.e., the date that data would start uploading to Netcare). He says once the date was in place everything went smoothly,
“In fact, for the first couple of days, I didn’t even know if anything was happening because, from our end, nothing was really different. Everything gets done in the background.”
“The overall message is that it didn’t really affect our workflow all that much, or not at all really. We basically did everything the same, we just had to make sure that we were entering data properly and everything else was done in the background.”
By participating in CII/CPAR, Dr. Truong also receives eNotifications. Dr. Truong does not act on all of them, but feels he is now more in touch with how his patients are doing.
“eNotifications are pretty short. They just show up in your labs. You don’t have to act on any of them if you don’t want to. but they are definitely useful to see.”
As part of CII/CPAR, the clinic placed
posters (
direct PDF download) in their office to disclose to patients what information was being sent to Netcare. The posters let patients know they could choose not to share that information. However, Dr. Truong has not had a single patient tell him that they don’t want their information shared. He says most patients are happy that their information is being shared with Netcare.
Now that Dr. Truong’s clinic is live on CII/CPAR, the clinic signs onto the CPAR platform once a month to look at their panel reports. New information they receive is their
panel conflict report. Panel conflicts have helped the clinic re-engage with patients and educate them about the importance of continuity and having one Patient’s Medical Home.
“My overall experience has definitely been a positive one. Has [CII/CPAR] been adding a lot in terms of extra work? No. Overall, it has definitely improved patient care and has helped me feel better about being able to add information to Netcare and being able to provide information that only I have about my patients.”
