This site is about participating in an online class about community engagement and collaboration
So, I am taking this course on the side and loving the content, the collaboration, and the community. It is very engaging and I am learning a lot.
Unfortunately, I am getting delayed in some of the work of my full time job and I think I have to take a break from the assignments in this course. For now I am going to stick to the readings, hangouts, and twitter chats. I will try to catch up with the assignments soon!
My research topic for this course is to determine metrics to evaluate the usefulness of a patient oriented discharge summary.
On the health system side, there are obvious, standard, and known metrics such as health outcomes, compliance with care plans, and process characteristics.
On the patient experience side, we have satisfaction, feelings of good communication, feelings of being informed, and on the provider experience side, we have the time to complete, the addition to workload, the feeling of improved communication, and satisfaction.
My additional questions are as follows:
1. How do we measure good communication excluding the feeling of good communication? Are there other, more concrete metrics that could be used?
2. What metrics would patients create to determine the usefulness of the form?
3. What about the family and caregivers? What metrics would they want to measure?
4. Are there any other measures of patient-centeredness that may be affected by this tool?
No matter how long I spent trying to think of a visualization of shared power, I kept coming back to the image of the group of pencils and the metaphor that one pencil alone is easy to break, but several together are that much stronger.
What a great first week! So much conversation, so much learning, and a lot of fun.
My week on twitter:
Following over 20 new handles and over 20 new followers!
30 favourites
a couple of retweets
a handful of really nice interactions and conversations on community, virtual communities, innovative scholarship
I definitely see the relevance of this course to my work and I look forward to more!
For the past two years, I have been leading a project looking at creating patient-oriented discharge summaries. The first year was spent co-designing a template with patients, caregivers, providers, and designers. The second year has been a multi-site pilot implementation in 8 hospital departments across Toronto (ranging from acute care, surgery, pediatrics, rehab, and more). It has been a lot of fun and I am currently compiling the results on some usability, feasibility, patient experience, and provider experience. basically, we wanted to see if it was usable and worth going further.
Here is a snapshot of the template we created:
Each site took it and made it there own and fit it into their processes. Solutions range from paper forms that patients fill out themselves to forms in the EHR with drop down menus.
We also created a website with lots of tools to support the implementation: http://pods-toolkit.uhnopenlab.ca/
The preliminary results look good and we are now preparing a grant proposal to do a more formal evaluation, which brings me to my research proposal. What are relevant and interesting outcomes to study based on this research? I have 2 main ideas and would actually like to pursue both, but probably not both for this class.
1. Design a pilot evaluation of the tool in one or more sites to study patient experience, provider experience, communication improvement, compliance to follow up, are patients finding the tool useful at home post-discharge, etc. I would want to involve the community of patients, caregivers, and providers int he design of the metrics and pilot.
2. What other tools are needed to improve patient experience in the health system so that this tool that has been successful could become part of a line of tools. Some initial ideas are something to make the room feel more quiet and private at night and something to reduce anxiety before procedures. I would need to involve the community to figure out where are the problem spots and what stuff would help.
The three to be parent advisory link is a group of parents with children who have disabilities or special needs that I love being part of. It is a group of people who support and help each other in good times and bad, who have similar needs and interests, and who where you can be comfortable being yourself.
This blog is created to participate in a course titled Collaborative Curiosity run by VCU, but open to the public. It is about community engagement research, which I am really excited about.
A bit about me: I am a health policy and management post-doctoral fellow at OpenLab (http://uhnopenlab.ca/), an innovation centre at the University Health Network. We work on a lot of really interesting projects in the health services field. We are particularly interested in the patient and provider experience and we use design methodology and participatory action research to really involve end users in the projects.
I am also co-chair of the Family Advisory Committee at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto and I am an advocate for patient and family centred care.
I am currently managing a multi-site pilot of Patient Oriented Discharge Summaries (PODS) in Toronto.
Shoshana Hahn-Goldberg 