Image of female checking her own blood pressure.

CorHealth Ontario Partnerships Supporting Primary Care

CorHealth Ontario’s corporate 2017-22 Strategy recognizes the need to focus on quality and performance across the continuum of cardiac, stroke and vascular care. The Strategy also recognizes that CorHealth Ontario should help primary care practitioners through active partnerships with organizations with the expertise and mandate in this sector. Such partnerships are essential to improve the management of cardiovascular chronic conditions including, but not limited to, hypertension and heart failure.

In the September issue of CorHealth Quarterly, we introduced our Integrating Heart Failure Care Initiative. CorHealth Ontario is also currently engaged in two partnerships to support the delivery of best practice hypertension and vascular care in the primary care setting.

  1. eHealth Centre of Excellence in the Waterloo Wellington LHIN
    The eHealth Centre of Excellence and CorHealth Ontario have partnered to develop and pilot a hypertension management flow sheet and custom query tools embedded within Telus Health’s Practice Solutions Suite Electronic Medical Record (PS Suite EMR). This will provide a technology solution to seamlessly support the delivery of best practice hypertension care that is integrated within primary care workflow. Together, we are aiming to make this solution available for implementation in 2019/20.
  2. Health Technologies Fund
    With support from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Health Technologies Fund, administered by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), CorHealth Ontario has partnered with several organizations to collaboratively evaluate and support the spread of Fig.P Software’s Cardiovascular iDynaFormTM. This technology solution integrates a dynamic clinical flow sheet for up to 14 vascular conditions/risk factors with OSCAR electronic medical records. Partner organizations include the Peninsula Family Health Team, Women’s College Hospital Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care, the eHealth Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Effective Practice and the Stroke Network of Southeastern Ontario. This project is currently recruiting primary care sites to participate in a pilot. The evaluation findings are expected later in 2019/20.

Through these two projects, CorHealth Ontario is optimistic that primary care providers will have two viable options for EMR-embedded tools to support the delivery of best practice hypertension and vascular care. Taken together, these two technology solutions can support a large proportion of primary care sites, given the market share of PS Suite and OSCAR.

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