On February 25th, members from the VALHUE study team attended the 26th annual CHSPR health policy conference titled “Performance Anxiety”, in Vancouver, BC. This year’s conference was focused on performance measurement in the Canadian healthcare system, and included Canadian as well as international perspectives from UK and Australia. The conference featured discussions about the current state of affairs of performance measurement in Canada; what is being done, how, and the impact of performance measurement on healthcare system change. Included in that was the role patients play in engaging in research through the use of patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) and patient reported experience measures (PREMs).
Speakers such as J.F. Levesque from the Bureau of Health Information in Australia and Lena Cuthbertson from the BC Ministry of Health spoke about the importance of incorporating patient needs and experiences in healthcare quality improvement. Emphasis was placed on the need to find a balance between what quality measures are significant to patients, and what measures are actionable by providers. A recent Canadian initiative in terms of patient experience surveys is the standardized Canadian Hospital Experiences Survey, which is set for implementation in April 2014. Developed by CIHI to facilitate pan-Canadian comparisons of inpatient experience, its aim is to help inform quality improvement initiatives and decisions about care delivery. In addition, the survey is based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey used in the US, which will allow for international comparisons of inpatient experience. This is a good example of the increasing use of PROMs and PREMs to improve, or at least measure improvements in the performance of Canada’s healthcare system.
To access links to the speaker slides from the CHSPR 2014 conference, please click here.