Yorkton Primary Health Care Innovation Site

There has been some exciting developments here in Yorkton.  There has been some giant leaps towards setting the stage where new concepts in primary health care redesign can be put to the test.

In May 2012 the Minister of Health of Saskatchewan announced the redesigned primary health care plan.  A more detailed report is available on the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health  website under Primary Health Care.  To briefly summarize: Patient Centered, Community Designed and Team delivered.  There is a lot more engagement at ground level with a bottom-up approach for design and supported by a ministry that enables the process.  This is a paradigm shift from the previous approach.

The minister announced that there will be continued support for existing primary health care sites and he also announced 8 innovation sites across Saskatchewan where new concepts will be put to the test so that successes can be spread throughout the province.  This is a strategic decision to fund new innovation sites without diluting available funds (by spreading it to multiple sites and end up with a situation that nobody has the resources to innovate.)

This is where we got the opportunity to prove what we have been saying all along - we can deliver innovation.  Our Yorkton project was chosen as 1 of the 8 innovation sites in the province.

Our initial concepts will include the following :

• Starting with a team made up from different silos in health care to deliver chronic disease management and then move to collocation in a primary health care site.  (Building the team before the building)
• Using a different EMR vendor (Optimed) than what Primary Health Care in Saskatchewan has been using until now (Medaccess)
• Our design for clinical space to be scalable if possible so that the design can be scaled up or down according to community size and needs.  Different functional components could be added or taken away from the design.  This would save others who want to move to team based care delivery the trouble of designing physical space from scratch.
• Having a different governance model.  This would mean not grouping people together in a team from different silos and keeping them accountable to their own silos, but rather manage them under a single umbrella with one vision, mission and principles
• A Physician led approach as opposed the Regional Health Authority led

So as an innovation site we got approved for funding to go through a LEAN design process called 3P (Production, Preparation, Process).  Here is a video of a clinic in Regina that went through the 3P process.

We had 2 days in June 2012 to get basic training in LEAN concepts and terminology.  Get consensus on our Vision, Mission and Principles.  We identified our service lines and crafted an action plan for data collection that will help guide us with our design process.  We have our 3P process scheduled for 16-20 July 2012.

CDM TEAM

So needless to say - we cannot wait to start our 3P process to design our new clinic / innovation site in the week of 16-20 July 2012...

We are ready to innovate ...