2018-10-19

Building Capacity in our Physician Community

Building clinical content (decision, documentation and inquiry supports) for Connect Care remains a top priority for committees, councils and specialty workgroups. We strive for an exemplary clinical information system (CIS) that will truly serve our vision of better information for better health. But even a perfect system will disappoint if we lack capacity to adopt it into day to day care, or to continually enhance its application for clinical improvement.

We've been building CIS capacity in the physician community for some time now. Excellent clinical informatics leadership, change management and knowledge translation capabilities have emerged. A few numbers give measure to these accomplishments:
  • Over 70 physician leaders are oriented, trained, supported and mobilized province-wide through the CMIO portfolio, including associate CMIOs (5), design leads (5) and medical informatics leads (61). They serve the Connect Care initiative, their zones and clinical areas and have enduring key roles in leadership, engagement and adoption.
  • 7 physician builders are fully certified, 27 have attended at least one builder course and up to 30 per year can be skilled-up for the next 3 years through the clinician builder program. Builders already accelerate clinical system design and will have pivotal roles in post-implementation optimization.
  • Over 150 physicians have completed CIS basic training, a handful have advanced to become power users and many more will attain super user skills. The resulting awareness has already improved committee and council functions while allowing CIS demonstrations to shift from from vendor to client.
  • Over 60 physician clinical guidance leads empower order set, decision support and other clinical content development.
  • 2 out of the expected 16 provincial physician trainers are already appointed and will guide recruitment of 40 area physician trainers. Physician trainers and 6 medical informatics education leads to team with power users and super users supporting physicians transitioning to Connect Care.
  • 6 clinical informatics specialists help knit all these groups together, guided by a strategy for building capacity to adopt and use Connect Care.
Connect Care empowers Alberta's physician community to optimize practice in a digitally-enabled healthcare workplace.