With the help of the RCA, health service providers across the province are adopting three tools to report data on outpatient rehabilitative care. The rollout of these tools will play an important role in improving evaluation of and planning for community based rehabilitative care needs at the local, regional and system levels. 

NACRS Clinic Lite
The RCA is working with CIHI, Health Quality Ontario and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) to provide educational sessions to providers on the use of NACRS Clinic Lite to capture outpatient rehab service utilization data and access and transition data. (The MOHLTC required that all organizations participating in the bundled funding pilot for hip and knee replacements use the tool.) The RCA, with others on the team, has delivered 10 educational sessions since the bundled funding pilot began. In addition, the RCA and CIHI have provided onboarding support to 24 sites over the past five months. Five of these sites are now submitting data to NACRS Clinic Lite, with more to follow shortly. 

WatLX™
The RCA is also facilitating use of the WatLX™ Outpatient Rehabilitative Care Experience Survey. The survey is now available from NRC Health to all hospital-based outpatient rehabilitation clinics through the Ontario Hospital Association. Interested hospitals are asked to contact their designated NRC Health contact person: Nick Fontana or Pamela Luciano.

Community Rehab Assessment
And finally, data for the RCA’s Phase II pilot of the revised Community Rehab Assessment (CRA) clinical outcomes tool has now been submitted. The nine-month pilot with 24 organizations is exploring how to better integrate the tool into existing clinical processes. It is also demonstrating the tool’s value in measuring functional change and describing complexity of rehab patients for different rehabilitation populations. Data analysis and a draft report will be available to participating sites in February 2019.

New report released

All three tools were piloted provincially in 2017/18 as part of the RCA’s proof of concept for a standardized outpatient/ambulatory minimum data set. The RCA has now released a report sharing the full results from the pilot, including provincial analysis of outpatient rehab utilization, results on patient experience and an analysis of functional improvement over an outpatient episode of care as measured by the Community Rehab Assessment. This marks the first time that comparable, standardized data has been collected and reported across outpatient/ambulatory rehabilitative care programs in Ontario. 

For more information, email info@rehabcarealliance.ca.