reports

Physician integrated network: a second look

Winnipeg, MB, Canada: Manitoba Centre for Health Policy.

Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

This is the second report from Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) that provides insight into the impact of the Physician Integrated Network (PIN) initiative—a primary care renewal initiative developed by Manitoba Health, Healthy Living and Seniors. The first report, Physician Integrated Network Baseline Evaluation: Linking Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and Administrative Data (Katz, Bogdanovic, & Soodeen, 2010), focused on comparing extracted data from the Electronic Medical Records of participating clinics with the data from the Population Health Research Data Repository (Repository) housed at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy. The findings primarily addressed the use of EMRs by PIN clinics and some early exploration of the impact of the initiative using indicators available from data held in the Repository.

This report builds on the previous study by adding a number of key components: first, PIN has expanded to include eight new clinics (Phase 2); second, the passage of time has provided the opportunity to provide a more realistic understanding of the impact of the initiative on patient care and outcomes; and third, we have added several new indicators that contextualize indicators associated with Quality Based Incentive Funding (QBIF).

We analyzed outcomes for the indicators for each clinic both before and after the implementation of PIN. We compared the changes over time to “shadow practices” (described below), which served as control groups for the PIN clinics. For the Phase 1 clinics we also analyzed the results for a second post-implementation period that we called “long-term follow-up.” This is not yet possible for the Phase 2 clinics because the initiative has not been active in these clinics long enough. We also provide a summation of the results for the four Phase 1 clinics, and for the eight Phase 2 clinics.

There are many factors that affect the quality of primary care. Reform of primary-care delivery is complex and challenging. Readers should bear in mind that the following analyses address only one of the four PIN objectives. The reality is that the results presented in this report do not provide a comprehensive evaluation of PIN.