Grant: Embedded Clinician Researcher Salary Award - Central Canada

I will be an embedded clinician researcher at Health Quality Ontario (HQO), the provincial advisor on the quality of healthcare in Ontario. I will work together with leaders and staff at HQO to develop a set of quality measures that assess how good the care is for people admitted to hospital and discharged home. Research has demonstrated that the care people receive when transitioning out of hospital is often fragmented and puts them at risk of developing complications. Yet, we currently do not have good ways of measuring and reporting on this care. Measuring the quality of care is a necessary step for improvement. Our research program will begin by asking members of the public what they think are the most important aspects of care for people transitioning from hospital to home. We will also look at what existing research says can be done to improve this care. We will use the feedback and research findings to develop a "Quality Standard" that outlines what good care looks like when people are discharged home from hospital. The Quality Standard will include 5 to 15 concise, specific recommendations. Each recommendation will be accompanied by a set of measures that can help organizations assess whether they are providing excellent care. Once we develop the measures, we will assess whether it is feasible for HQO to collect and report some of them systematically for hospitals, primary care practices, and home care organizations in Ontario. We will consider which of these measures should be reported directly to the public, which should be reported to organizations privately, and which would be most useful to spur local improvements in care. We will then conduct a large research study to evaluate the impact of having HQO i) publicly report measures and ii) prioritize measures for local quality improvement. We will assess whether these changes result in improvements to the quality of care for people discharged from hospital to home.