Why it matters
Pooling resources and sharing skills make our healthcare system more efficient and effective. Collaboration reduces biases and integrates diverse perspectives, leading to a more comprehensive data analysis.
Call-to-Action
The HPA-OHT and IDS are interested in adding organizations from HPA-OHT to be able to provide a comprehensive picture of the patient journey and the data for our population. IDS is available for multiple sectors, including community support services, mental health & addiction services, etc.
Dig Deeper
The Huron Perth and Area Ontario Health Team (HPA-OHT) has partnered with the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) in the use of their decision support/analytics tool called Integrated Decision Support (IDS). This partnership provides the HPA-OHT with a robust set of tools to better understand, act on, and improve healthcare in our region. IDS is an advanced and comprehensive means to extract, combine, and report on data across OHT partners.
The HPA-OHT member organizations currently contributing data to IDS include:
- Hospitals: Huron Health System, Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance, Listowel Wingham Hospital Alliance
- Primary Care Teams: Bluewater Area Family Health Team, Clinton Family Health Team, Grand Bend Community Health Centre, Happy Valley Family Health Team, Huron community Family Health Team, STAR Family Health Team
- Long-Term Care Homes: Exeter Villa, West Perth Village (Ritz Lutheran Villa)
- Homecare: Home and Community Care Support Services.
The OHT is onboarding any interested organizations now. If your organization is interested in IDS and wants to provide data from your electronic health record system, please contact Kimberly Van Wyk at kim.vanwyk@hpaoht.ca to learn more.
What is Integrated Decision Support (IDS) and what does it do?
IDS is a tool that addresses the frustrating data “blind spots” across the system. IDS is a data-sharing platform across a host of subscribers. It offers quality improvement data on shared care patients across a continuum of healthcare services to provide context into the patient journey. Over the years, IDS has evolved into Ontario’s most mature and widely used collaborative solution for sharing integrated health partner data for planning and system-wide improvements, including population health, population identification, evaluation of project implementation, and analytics. IDS makes it easy to turn data into insights through a multitude of pre-built, on-demand report templates and dashboards that save countless hours of data preparation work.
What can IDS do for the Huron Perth and Area Ontario Health Team and its partner organizations?
- IDS provides a comprehensive ready-to-use platform with an integrated view of patient activity. Organizations are not limited to their current data-sharing partners, but any IDS participant that your patients encounter.
- IDS enabled centralized data analysis and reporting that is accurate, timely and in context. Tools within IDS allow for comprehensive evaluation of data from across the HPA-OHT to allow for learning, monitoring, engagement, and change based on data-driven decisions.
- IDS removes the need to develop systems and databases that collect, store, assemble, calculate, and report on data. IDS also facilitates multiple partner agreements as it provides a robust, pre-built platform with data governance.
Data Submission and Privacy
A person at each organization is designated as responsible for data submission will upload data either monthly or quarterly depending on organization type, e.g. quarterly for LTC, monthly for PC.
Patient-specific data can only be obtained from the agent at the request of the organization providing the data; otherwise, the data is aggregated for partner organizations and IDS submitters with no capability of obtaining PHI.
