Steinbach Family Medical unleashes the power of CHR Advanced Analytics

September 11, 2024

Steinbach Family Medical serves as a clinical home for its patients offering timely, focused care from primary care providers. The doctors are supported by other care providers including general surgeons, mental health professionals, chronic disease specialists and a clinical pharmacist providing continuous, team-based care throughout their patients’ healthcare journeys. Steinbach Family Medical is also a teaching facility for medical students from the University of Manitoba and for residents in Family Medicine.

The challenge

“Ours is an active, high-functioning clinic – we needed a single-source solution to engage our patients, help our team work efficiently, and enable us to collaborate seamlessly with other partners in health,” says Dr. Mark Duerksen, a physician at Steinbach Family Medical. “We also needed to be able to gather data and use that data to inform medical decisions as they relate to our patients’ care.”

The solution

In 2018, the clinic adopted the TELUS Collaborative Health Record (CHR), a fully configurable, unified platform that offers full EMR functionality plus tools for patient engagement, clinic administration, referral and waitlist management, and advanced analytics that provide powerful clinical and business data - in real-time.

The CHR brings valuable health data to the surface

“Good healthcare is strongly supported by good data”, says Dr. Duerksen. “If that data can’t be extracted and analyzed, we can’t use it to make evidence-based, informed care decisions for our patients.”

Through intelligent dashboards, the CHR surfaces high-quality, structured health information that can be collected for purposeful use - both at a level of the individual patient as well as at higher levels to understand populations and help a practice evolve.

CHR Advanced Analytics includes multiple dashboards covering various aspects of a clinic’s operation such as appointments and scheduling, billing, payment and accounting reports, vaccinations, patient questionnaires, Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM), encounters, communications and referrals. CHR Mass Actions allows users to update multiple files simultaneously and send communications to patient groups. Also included are tools to build and edit a clinic's own dashboards where a clinic view multiple tables or graphs on a single page for smarter data-driven insights.

Customized dashboards fit the bill

The Steinbach Family Medical team has used CHR Enterprise Analytics from the very beginning. “We appreciate the robust dashboards, the clean data displays, and the ability to drill down for more detailed, compiled reports.”

And while they’ve found several CHR out-of-the-box dashboards useful, having the ability to custom-build their own to gather insights and analyze specific areas of their business has proven to be indispensable.

“By simply adjusting variables and visualization features, I’ve been able to create a variety of dashboards for various projects, which is very satisfying,” says Dr. Duerksen.

Custom-built dashboards have helped to:

Track data for medical student and family medicine resident projects such as vaccine use in pregnancy, PPI use, shingles vaccine, flu vaccine, gout, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and more
Compile annual visit statistics for health team partners - mental health professionals, dietitians, chronic disease nurses, clinical pharmacist and wound care nurse
Gather insights for eye and foot checks as part of a Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycle for patients with diabetes
Conduct medication searches for clinical pharmacist
Track data related to COVID vaccinations
Gather reports from Qnaire patient-submitted surveys
Compile data on panels for chronic disease management