Telling the Palliative Care Story with Data

Standard healthcare metrics do not tell the story well for palliative care. They were never designed to. We need measures which make sense. This means translating the anecdotes that palliative care workers understand into evidence to inform decisions in the organization, the community and the healthcare systems across the country.

In 2016, Hospice Palliative Care Ontario (HPCO) began developing a suite of palliative care performance measures. Dozens of organizations, and hundreds of individuals were engaged. Their ideas were brought to life in a comprehensive palliative care dataset using a Balanced Scorecard model aligned with the Quintuple Aims.

This Learning Institute session will cover a broad range of topics to provide a holistic overview organizational performance related to palliative care.
• What is integrated organizational performance?
• What is a Balanced Scorecard?
• What are the Quintuple Aims?
• Why are these ideas important?
• What does it look like in practice and how does it work?
• What types of datasets are important to include?
• What new palliative care performance measures help to tell our story?
• What were some of the challenges and bringing this together?
• What was the process to arrive at this result?
• What does the data tell us?
• What can we do to affect positive change?

Foundations:
A brief opening section will discuss some of the key concepts and theoretical foundations around organizational performance.

Understanding Performance:
We will explore the practical and theoretical aspects of what constitutes good performance measures using the working model. An operational working example will demonstrates these concepts and what they look like when they come together.

Tapping into Collective Wisdom:
Albert Einstein famously said: “the problems created by one level of thinking cannot be solved with that same level of thinking”. Our approach tapped into the collective wisdom of the sector. Participants may be service providers, healthcare professionals, managers, executives, bureaucrats, researchers, family members and those with lived experience. This is not an academic process. It is a pragmatic and creative one. We will outline the process and discuss the Strategic Outcome Map deliverable.

What do we know? What can we do?:
Tens of thousands of data points were collected over more than 8 years. Many of these measures have never been calculated anywhere. This data is available in a comprehensive, transparent and auditable manner. Key findings from the experience in Ontario will be presented. Participants will be encouraged to engage in a lively discussion around the findings, their significance and what we can do to affect positive change for the palliative care sector across the country.

The results of this work enable powerful data to tell your story with data at both the organizational and system level levels.

By attending this session, participants will: 

• Understand the concepts of balanced scorecard, quintuple aims and performance measures.
• Learn about specific palliative care performance measures, correlations and system performance results from Ontario over the last 10 years.
• Learn how to tell your story with data at the organizational and system level to influence local and provincial healthcare systems.

Telling the Palliative Care Story with Data
Thursday, November 12, 11:30am to 3:00pm (Eastern).

Brian Tramontini

Mr. Tramontini founded Stratim over 25 years ago after holding a variety of roles in government and the private sector. Stratim specializes in organizational performance metrics with a focus on healthcare. Brian co-led the development and creation of the Hospice Palliative Care Ontario (HPCO) suite of performance measures in 2016.

The Stratim software platform supports over 60 palliative care services providers across the province of Ontario through the HPCO Quality Management Platform. Stratim also supported the formation of the Palliative Care Collaborative which comprises nearly 30 organizations which developed and adapted data collection tools specifically for the palliative care sector.