As part of the IMAGINE Network’s collaboration with Crohn’s & Colitis Canada and the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology (CAG), researchers developed PACE: A Quality Improvement initiative for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In the past year, a consensus process was conducted with Canadian IBD experts and patient-input to establish a list of 45 quality indicators (QIs). A quality indicator is essentially a “yardstick” against which an IBD clinic can assess the quality of its care delivery. The list of QIs established will be implemented across five IBD Centres of Excellence. This list of QIs will also be made available to other IBD centres across Canada, as well as community gastroenterology practices, to ensure that the maximum possible number of Canadians living with IBD have access to an acceptable standard of care. The manuscript on the quality indicators has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal and will be published later in 2018.
In a related project, the QIs developed have also been used to help design a Global Rating Scale (GRS) tool for IBD. The IBD GRS is a web-based tool that will serve as a type of scorecard, giving a clinic the ability to evaluate its performance against standardized metrics, and highlight areas of care delivery that could be improved upon. The tool is currently in development, and is expected to be available through the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology’s (CAG) website by the end of 2018. More than 1,000 gastroenterologists, surgeons, pediatricians and nurses, who make up CAG’s membership, will have access to the IBD GRS. The manuscript describing the development of the IBD GRS tool has been drafted and will be published in a peer-reviewed journal later in 2018. Focus groups with IBD patients were completed in Toronto, Calgary and Montreal. The themes extracted from the focus groups were incorporated into the quality indicators and the IBD GRS tool. The creation of the web-based platform by CAG to host the IBD GRS tool has taken longer than anticipated. Further, negotiations on a funding agreement have delayed this collaboration. Ultimately, the Quality Improvement Initiative for IBD will equip IBD healthcare providers from across Canada with the tools they need to engage in quality improvement in their clinics, and ultimately deliver better care to IBD patients.
