Looking to improve your practice? Say hi to MyPI

There’s a new tool for doctors who want to make improvements in their practice—and earn continuing medical education credits in the process. My Practice Improvement—or MyPI for short—is a made-in-Alberta online technology designed to make it easier for physicians to identify performance gaps in their practice, document improvements and get CME credits with the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. “We need to think about how physicians maintain their competence in Canada and about different ways of doing professional development, which has traditionally been going to conferences and reading journals,” said Dr. Kelly Burak, assistant dean at the University of Calgary’s Continuing Medical Education and Professional Development (CME&PD) program, which worked with the province’s Physician Learning Program (PLP) to develop MyPI. “There's very little evidence that these help change physician behaviour.” MyPi helps by using individual- and peer-based data to assess which areas of a physician’s practice present opportunities for meaningful quality improvement. Physicians can then do quality improvement independently or as a part of a group, or choose from a list of quality improvement activity templates. Read: Faster, better, less agonizing: How one college is building a more efficient, less punitive complaints process Dr. Katrina Nicholson, a clinical lecturer at University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and medical director at CME&PD and PLP, said physicians who are working on quality improvement often don’t compare their practice to those in their peer group. Documenting the practice improvement is also a challenge for many doctors. “In primary care, what we often found was physicians didn't do the documentation piece to the standard that the college would have required, and certainly will require now,” said Dr. Nicholson. “We recognized that not every physician has good (quality improvement) support in their practice, and not every physician even has an interest or understanding of quality improvement.” One respiratory group within a primary care network in Calgary that used MyPI found physicians were not ordering the appropriate level of tests for certain patient groups. Read: How to hire and keep a good medical office administrator “The implication of that is that they’re either ordering very complex testing when it’s not necessary, or they are just treating empirically without testing or they’re basically not responding to changes in a patient’s profile and retesting to see what needs to be done,” said Dr. Nicholson. MyPI builds on the foundational idea that effective practice improvement starts with a solid understanding of the practice. But physicians often don’t know how they can develop this knowledge and those who do may choose to focus their practice improvement efforts in areas where they’re already doing a good job. “We don’t understand our knowledge gaps,” said Dr. Burak. “At least. We haven't been able to measure it very effectively. And, and one of the other problems is that physicians tend to go to things that they're already knowledgeable in or are already good at. We don't understand our gaps." Embedded coaching then gives guidance on how doctors can reflect on their practices, identify opportunities for change and create an action plan for improvement. MyPI will even direct physicians to relevant data sources. “If you’re a family physician, that might mean knowing how many diabetics you’ve got on your list, are they coming in regularly to see you and are they getting the right tests,” said Dr. Nicholson. “You've got to have a means of assessing these and using data is a very good method of doing that. But you also have to be able to understand and react to the data.” MyPI was launched in April initially for Alberta doctors and is now available for all physicians across the country. There is a subscription fee of $199 a year but early bird subscribers currently get a discounted rate of $99 a year. Read: Using audit and feedback to provide better care

Looking to improve your practice? Say hi to MyPI

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