IDS: Ontario’s most widely used solution for sharing health partner data

One of the most persistent barriers to better integrating care for patients is access to data, especially in a system that has traditionally operated in siloes. Integrated Decision Support (IDS) was developed to address these data “blind spots” through its data sharing platform and is now empowering a host of connected subscribers, including hospitals, home and community care, primary care, community health centres, community mental health, and paramedic services. Today, IDS is Ontario’s most mature and widely used collaborative solution for sharing integrated health partner data.

Through its platform, IDS offers data at a patient level across a continuum of healthcare services, giving subscribers a line of sight into the patient journey, even when they cross regional boundaries.

IDS links patient data for over 100 healthcare organizations, covering 9.8 million unique patients and over 180 million patient encounters.

IDS also integrates province-wide Statistics Canada Population Census information and the Ontario Marginalization Index, allowing population health equity questions to be married with healthcare data utilization in a population health management approach, right to the patient level. These data are used for system planning, performance management and efficiencies, analytics, reporting, integrated care planning, outcome measurement and evaluation – all focused on improving quality of care for Ontarians.

Guided by the principle of “once-for-many”, IDS is a provider-driven, collaborative community that simplifies data integration and common analytical challenges, supported by customer-focused training, education and knowledge transfer.

Harnessing data from a well-organized repository and set of tools, such as pre-built reports and dashboards, IDS helps save time for busy analysts and enables standardization and comparability of initiatives and indicators amongst subscribers.

Paired with IDS’s Tableau analytics platform, these reporting templates – developed in response to requests from the subscriber community – provide validated, ready-made reports that can be tailored to meet local needs. IDS supports care delivery organizations with a view into their shared patients and the ability to cohort and segment populations by patient condition, patient geography, age, cost, and many more factors.

For example, IDS recently released two new Stroke Distinction Tableau reports, which provide subscribers participating in the Accreditation Canada program convenient, easy access to their organization’s stroke distinction key quality indicator results in just one click.

The reports provide results for 13 stroke quality indicators for specific organizations and enable benchmarking with peers across nine indicators. Quarterly and annual indicator results are readily available, making monitoring and submission to Accreditation Canada effortless, and built-in flexibility allows IDS analysts to save customized versions of these reports for their organization.

What sets IDS apart: Subscribers benefit from several features and services that set IDS apart, including timely access to data, and most notably, its unique ability to support local integration activities, such as Ontario Health Teams (OHTs), bundled care, and Integrated Care Programs.

Consultations with 37 OHTs in 2023 have resulted in new geographical-based catchments that equip IDS subscribers with the ability to easily select practical cohorts to support timely OHT-related analytics and planning efforts.

Now live on the platform, these OHT Catchments complement the Ontario Health OHT Attributed Population, allowing IDS subscribers to drill into patient-level details to discover drivers and patterns of healthcare utilization, and much more. IDS continues to add to its OHT reporting catalogue, which now includes hospital metrics for OHT Catchments, palliative care cohort monitoring, and frail seniors’ care transitions.

Subscribers also benefit from more granular collaborative Quality Improvement Plan (cQIP) measures that help evaluate the success of OHT initiatives.

Groundbreaking work with the Guelph Wellington OHT is a great example of IDS in action. Leveraging IDS to share data across providers is now enabling the OHT to segment their population by complexity of needs which, in turn, is helping inform the development of care plans tailored to patients’ specific requirements across a range of providers.

This has led to better care coordination and optimal use of the OHT’s available resources. Additionally, by incorporating the Hospital-Patient One-Year Mortality Risk (HOMR) tool into IDS, the OHT can now use IDS’s integrated data to identify patients who would benefit from a palliative approach to care.

This allows the care team to proactively initiate an integrated care plan that includes all aspects of palliative care, including advanced care planning, serious illness and symptom management conversations, etc.

Benefits are two-fold: for providers, informing them which individuals may benefit from wrap-around care, and at the system level, allowing the OHT to predict required palliative care capacity across the Guelph Wellington population and plan accordingly. The HOMR score is now available to the IDS network of subscribers via IDS’s once-for-many approach.

Through active listening, IDS will continue to expand its offering with new datasets, tools and insights of the greatest interest to its user community. For example, currently in the pilot stage are integrations with community support services and hospital ambulatory clinics – both non-traditional datasets – as well as long-term care. As more organizations join the IDS network, ever-richer data is being made available to improve health service delivery across the province.

By putting analytical power in the hands of its subscriber community, IDS is working to support a vision of an integrated and patient-focused system of care. Learn more about how IDS can support your organization, or reach out directly to Wendy Gerrie, director, IDS, at wgerrie@oha.com.