*"Well done is better than well said."* - Benjamin Franklin -
		Can how we pay providers pave the way to improved patient care? Solution-seeking spring symposium to probe question and feature former US Gov Howard Dean Does the way health-care providers are paid motivate change? Can incentives be aligned to support integrated care and improved patient experience? Is pay for performance, service-based, or blended models the way to go? What's worked well where, and why? Guided by leaders from inside and outside Canada with the experience and expertise to provide answers, about 100 front-line planners, health policy thinkers and decision-makers from Ontario will fix their minds on those issues April 26th during an invitational symposium, Tools for Change: levers and Incentives for Integrating Patient Care in Ontario. The symposium, co-sponsored by The Change Foundation and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, will focus on funding strategies, barriers and innovations to kindle ideas and alliances in Ontario, prompt recommendations for short and long-term objectives. LEARN MORE
		Integration from the community provider angle: The Foundation surveys on-the-ground views to better coordinate community care for patients In your own words, what does good coordinated community care for clients mean to you? What would it look like? If you could change one thing to improve client care, what would it be? These questions - and many others -- were put to 2,200 community providers in surveys sent by the Foundation in late 2009/early 2010 to capture their frontline views on how to provide more integrated care in communities across Ontario. This work complements our earlier work (June 2008) probing patient/caregiver perspectives on navigating the system. Now, working with the Community Provider Association Committee and the Ontario Association of Community Care Access Centres, we're handing the mike over to community health and support providers. LEARN MORE
		The Change Foundation-Health Strategy Innovation Cell partner with provider to probe how Web 2.0 can improve patient care - how to best listen and learn? Patients and caregivers everywhere are busy blogging, tweeting and building Web 2.0 communities to discuss their health-care experiences. As health-care leaders, providers, and advisors, how do we best tap this rich reservoir of real-time real-life stories to improve patient care? Can listening to patients' social media commentary about their health-care experiences provide new low-cost/high-touch quality improvement (QI) opportunities and value? How do we responsibly integrate what we're learning into existing QI efforts to complement policy and research on patient satisfaction? The Foundation has joined forces with another think tank, Health Strategy Innovation Cell, to find out in an intriguing project, using on-line patient dialogue to drive health-care improvement. The project will develop and test emerging best practice guidelines on using social media to enhance QI and patient-centred care, and will produce an e-toolkit of case studies and informed discussion around lessons learned about the potential and limitations of social media to improve health care. LEARN MORE
		The Change Foundation & The Commonwealth Fund put their minds to improving primary care on both sides of the border during 1st Canada-US policy exchange As Top of Mind readers might recall, last year the Foundation and The Commonwealth Fund (CWF) decided to put their minds and money together to co-sponsor a US-Canada health policy exchange, focusing first on primary care reform. The inaugural international meeting on health-care quality, "Innovations in Primary Care" takes place next month in New York and will convene about 20 American and Canadian policy leaders. They will dive deep into what makes or breaks good primary care on both sides of the border and surface with common and discrete solutions to improve primary care - and the performance of our respective health systems. "The picture is clear and it isn't pretty: the US and Canada remain far behind other countries in providing quality primary care on many counts," says Change Foundation CEO Cathy Fooks. "That's why we need exchanges like this -- to identify what changes are possible and preferable, and where improvements could become permanent." LEARN MORE
		Change Foundation joins others to support 1st collaborative competition on patient/client safety in home care in Canada: Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) issues RFA While we're starting to get a clearer picture of the safety risks in Canada's acute-care settings, we're still largely in the dark when it comes to knowing how big a problem we have with patient/client safety in home care in Canada. To fill this gap, a number of organizations, including The Change Foundation, have partnered with CPSI to fund research that will reveal the scope of the problem. CPSI launched the research competition (RFA - Patient/Client safety in Home Care in Canada) January 28th. This is the first time -- not only in Canada, but internationally -- for major funding (up to $1.1 million) to be made available for researchers to study patient/client safety in home care. The sponsoring organizations are CPSI, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (IHSPR), Institute of Aging (IA), Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health (ICRH); The Change Foundation; and the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF). LEARN MORE
		Thinking ahead with a little help (or a lot) from our friends: The Change Foundation's strategic plan renewal for 2010-2013 The Change Foundation's 2007-2010 strategic plan, Contemplating the way we change, Changing the way we think, set up the Foundation to shift from a granting agency to an independent health policy think tank. It carved out a new and narrower set of strategic directions focused on health integration and quality improvement, and laid out expectations for what we wanted to achieve under each of them. And now the Foundation is asking itself - and the health-care community -- how it can best build on that plan to precipitate change that improves health-care policy, practice and the patient experience in Ontario. LEARN MORE
		What's CHQI done for you lately? For starters, smoothing transitions for many more patients like Flo and giving its website a QI makeover. Since 2007, CHQI's Flo initiative has aimed to improve transitions as patients move from hospital to community and to build long-term capability for quality improvement among health-care organizations across Ontario's Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). Gains to date on both fronts are encouraging. "It's really been quite impressive," said Susan Taylor, project lead at CHQI. "The teams are very rapidly spreading the change ideas to move patients from admission to discharge in more timely and efficient ways." LEARN MORE