Optimize Your Practice

If you’re thinking about ways to optimize your practice, our practice support team can help you get started. With your practice team’s specific needs and goals in mind, our practice improvement coaches are available to help clarify roles, establish structures, and make lasting improvements in areas like health technology, panel management, and team-based care. 

In addition, peer mentors can bring clinical expertise and direct experience to the support we provide. Physician and medical office assistant (MOA) peer mentors work with our coaches to co-facilitate learning opportunities and provide one-on-one support directly in doctors' practices.

We use a quality improvement (QI) approach that’s flexible and tailored to your practice, focusing on:

1. Setting goals
2. Implementing changes
3. Measuring results
4. Assessing for improvement
5. Sustaining successful practice change

Within our team, coaches with a specialized skill set and focus on team-based care (TBC) work with peers across the province to provide additional supports in the areas of leadership, conflict resolution, role clarity, communication, and team development. Coaches can also help primary care networks (PCNs) plan for team-based care and the impacts on physicians and teams in their community.

Learn more about team-based care supports.

Use our patient experience tool to survey patients about their experiences and interactions with your family practice on topics such as wait times, office hours, coordination of care, and cultural sensitivity. 

Clinics can send the survey to patients electronically (email or SMS) or ask patients to complete it on tablets provided by FPSC's practice support program. Tablets typically rotate between participating clinics every six to eight months but can be available for longer periods for practices that choose to continuously survey their patients.

• Practice team members access responses in real-time using a web-based dashboard. 
• Patient responses are anonymous and are available only when a minimum of five responses per question are received. 
• Our practice improvement coaches help physicians and teams in collecting and reviewing patient data to inform the implementation of practice improvements. 
• Practices can opt to share aggregated data with their local division. 

The patient voice can contribute to a family practice’s work to adopt the attributes of a patient medical home and to determine readiness to participate in a primary care network.

To get started, complete the patient experience enrolment form. A practice support team member will connect with you for next steps.

To help doctors and practice teams stay up to date on information and best practices in key areas of clinical and practice management, we offer a variety of flexible, evidence-based, learning opportunities. Our practice improvement coaches support doctors and teams to apply learnings and put theory to practice, paving the way for positive, sustainable change.

Learning opportunities are:

• Short, flexible, and tailored to a practice’s immediate learning needs.
• Interactive to help physicians maximize the value of their learning time.
• Multi-modal (online, in-person, and/or blended) to work with physician schedules and learning preferences.
• Focused on themes of patient self-management, quality improvement, and team-based care.

Practice management topics include:

• Practice improvement [quality improvement (QI)]
• Team-based care 
• Panel management
• Health technology (EMR, virtual care)
• Group medical visits

Clinical topics include:

• Adult mental health
• Child and youth mental health
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• Chronic pain
• Heart failure
• Hypertension
• Palliative care
• Substance use

Whether you already know what kind of support you’re looking for or want to learn more about how your practice might benefit, our team can help you.

If you're interested in connecting with a peer mentor to support your practice, please contact us.