Conference Board of Canada’s Summit on Sustainable Health and Health Care

Last week I attended the Conference Board of Canada’s Summit on Sustainable Health and Health Care. Leaders from all spectrums of health care were present, including organizations, companies, health ministries and authorities, providers, and patients. Daniel Muzyka, President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada opened with the statement that we should all be committed to having the best health care system and the healthiest population.

Several speakers indicated that Canada does well in acute care, primarily because our public health care system has been built around hospitals, doctors and curing illness. Where we are ailing is in the areas of access, chronic disease management, community care, and care for our elderly. It was said repeatedly that the U.S. should not be our comparator, as the U.S. system is much different from ours and they are often lagging much further behind other countries in terms of health care sustainability. Canadian comparisons are better made to other countries with similar health care systems that are high performing.

André Picard spoke about transforming health care in Canada. He indicated that Canada has the least effective, least efficient, and least accessible system in the world (not including the U.S.). He said in order to move forward, we need to have goals and outcomes and define sustainability as not just maintaining the status quo, but determining the priorities for moving forward, and striving for innovation.

Anna Reid, the president elect of the Canadian Medical Association talked about the social determinants of health as being crucial. She said we need to focus on vulnerable populations to eliminate health disparities – a sentiment that was echoed in other presentations.

Hélène Campbell, a 21-year-old double lung transplant recipient gave an inspiring talk about her experiences in the health care system and how social media gave her a platform to advocate for organ and tissue donation. Her advice to health care leaders was to use patient stories as an impetus for change, to tackle issues one small thing at a time, and to keep communication among providers, patients, and families moving forward.

The lack of health innovation in Canada was addressed by a panel of experts who encouraged Canadians to find opportunities to innovate at a system level. At the Health Council, we recently launched our health innovation portal which features innovative practices in health care across Canada. It’s there for everyone to share and learn from.

This summit provided an opportunity to learn about current research and hear different perspectives on how health care can be sustained and improved upon in Canada. We’ll draw upon the many insights gained at the summit to inform our ongoing work on health care reform.

Shilpi Majumder, Policy Lead, Health Council of Canada

The Online Chronic Disease Self-Management Program: A Health Council webinar

In September we held a webinar on online chronic disease self-management programs. Dr. Bruce Beaton hosted the panel discussion based on our recent report, Self-Management Support for Canadians with Chronic Conditions: A Focus for Primary Health Care. After the webinar, some participants had questions that remained unanswered. We went back to the panel and got the responses. Below is a sample of one of the interesting discussions created – for all the Q&A, click here.

Q: Are there any programs being developed to build capacity in self-management systems for providers?

Patrick McGowan

Patrick McGowan, Professor, School of Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria, BC: Self-management support are the strategies and techniques that health professionals use with patients in their clinical practice – which is different from the online program that is being provided to people with chronic health conditions. There are lots of articles and booklets describing self-management support. Perhaps the best resource would be the recent Health Council of Canada report entitled Self-management support for Canadians with chronic health conditions: A focus for primary health care. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any online training available for health professionals.

Peter Sargious

Peter Sargious, Medical Director of Chronic Disease with Alberta Health Services, Calgary, AB: Within Alberta, there are a number of programs available to support providers to build their capacity in self-management support. The Alberta Health Services provincial CDM division has developed a number of online education modules including CDM 101 that emphasizes self -management support via relationship building and collaborative partnerships between patient and provider. This team is also building a ‘health coaching’ initiative starting with some pilot projects later this year. There are currently over 45 ‘Choices and Changes’ facilitators within the province.

Crowdsourcing for Health Innovation

Wayne Leung, Digital Communications Specialist, Health Council of Canada

A few weeks ago a team from the Health Council attended Crowdsourcing for Health Innovation. The event, hosted by St. Elizabeth Healthcare, brought health system planners, managers and policy-makers together with digital communications professionals and other members of the Technorati to explore the concept of “crowdsourcing” and how it could be applied to health care.

The concept of crowdsourcing can loosely be defined as the self-organizing of communities of engaged users/clients/customers to participate in the creation of some end product. A good example is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia based entirely on user-generated content.

The keynotes for the event are veritable superstars in the digital world; Jeff Howe, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who coined the term crowdsourcing, and Rahaf Harfoush, who was a digital strategist for Barak Obama’s first presidential campaign.

While crowdsourcing has been broadly applied across a variety of sectors, the health care sector has lagged. Howe pointed to a “culture of resistance” that seems to pervade in health care and impedes innovation.

The pair did share some interesting health care-related examples. Howe cited the example of the monomeric retroviral protease, a molecule in AIDS research. After engaging the video gaming community to find ways to “fold” the molecule within a given sets of constraints gamers, who have keen pattern recognition skills, found a solution within two weeks.

Harfoush then cited the example of the Open Source Drug Discovery Program allowing researchers to bypass patent-heavy pharmaceutical field to develop new drugs.

Howe went on to say that vast amounts of untapped data exist in the health care system. Patients possess knowledge of their symptoms and their pathology, and this information isn’t being gathered or harnessed. Given the Health Council’s recent reporting on patient engagement I wondered if crowdsourcing has applications as a means to improve patient engagement.

The concept of crowdsourcing is rife with potential for application throughout the health care sector and I’m looking forward to exploring ways to harness its potential for our work at the Health Council.