July 12 - 18, 2024
New study - Maternal disability and newborn discharge to social services: a population-based study
A new study has found that newborns of mothers with disabilities were more likely to be discharged into social services care immediately following their birth.
New study - Cost evaluation of the Ontario virtual urgent care pilot program: population-based, matched cohort study
In 2020, the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Ontario, Canada, introduced a virtual urgent care (VUC) pilot program to provide alternative access to urgent care services and reduce the need for in-person emergency department (ED) visits for patients with low acuity health concerns.
This costing evaluation supports the use of VUC as most complaints were addressed without referral to ED. Future research should evaluate targeted applications of VUC (eg, VUC models led by nurse practitioners or physician assistants with support from ED physicians) to inform future resource allocation and policy decisions.
领英推荐
New study - Antipsychotic discontinuation and new trazodone use in Ontario nursing homes: evidence of medication substitution
An unintended consequence of efforts to reduce antipsychotic medications in nursing homes is the increase in use of other psychotropic medications; however, evidence of substitution remains limited. Our objective was to measure individual-level prescribing patterns consistent with substitution of trazodone for antipsychotics.
2024 CIO Awards Canada
Please join us in congratulating ICES' Data Quality and Information Management team (DQIM) on winning a 2024 CIO Award for their Modernization of Record Linkage (MORL) project! This project led by DQIM with the support of IT, transitioned ICES record linkage from Probabilistic Record Linkage (PRL) to Fuzzy Matching. This transition has enabled ICES to automate decision making on record matching which eliminated a significant amount of manual review. This transition reduced the record linkage time for some cases from a year to few weeks. Software utilizing PRL, required the most personnel time to complete the record linkage process. The manual intervention for gray area introduced human error and results were based on subjective decisions. Fuzzy Matching approach was able to eliminate the gray area resolution, achieving similar (or higher) record linkage rate while maintaining (or improving) the accuracy. The advantages were improving the data timeliness, saving on clerical review, and preventing human error. The implementation of this new approach at the organization level required full scope of a change management.
Congratulations to Mahmoud Azimaee, Ganga Kalappa, Charlotte Ma, Nan Wang, Winnie Shen and Jason Chai-Onn