New Tools for Measuring and Improving Patient Safety in Canadian Hospitals.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) have collaborated on a new measure of patient safety, along with a resource of evidence-informed practices. This measure captures four broad categories of harm in acute care hospitals, consisting of 31 clinical groups selected by clinicians. Analysis showed that harm was experienced in 1 of 18 hospital stays in Canada in 2014ߝ2015 and that no single category accounted for the majority of harmful events. Although CIHI and CPSI continue to work with hospitals and experts to further refine the methodology, the measure and associated Improvement Resource are useful new tools for monitoring and identifying harm, and have the potential to improve patient safety.

Quality of care: international comparisons of Canadian provinces.

There is increasing interest in comparing Canada's health system internationally to enhance accountability, promote benchmarking and increase mutual learning. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) developed an interactive web display using data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, CIHI and Statistics Canada.

Assessing primary healthcare using pan- Canadian indicators of health and health system performance.

Updated primary healthcare (PHC) indicators are now available for use across Canada. The Canadian Institute for Health Information identified and updated two sets of priority indicators - a policy set to meet the needs of policy makers and a provider set to meet the needs of providers of PHC at the practice and organization levels. A total of 51 indicator definitions were updated to ensure that they are measurable and operational, align with clinical practice guidelines and available data sources and reflect important dimensions of PHC performance in Canada.