Doorways moves assessments online
BY NORM TOLLINSKY
Several health-care agencies and organizations providing mental health and addiction services in the Thunder Bay and Algoma districts are getting a taste of Ontario’s new Integrated Assessment Record (IAR) repository.
Called Doorways and accessed through a portal, it provides a select number of agencies and organizations in four local health integration networks (LHINs) with access to two standardized assessments: the Ontario Common Assessment of Needs (OCAN) and the Resident Assessment Instrument – Mental Health (RAI-MH).
Participating health service providers seeing a new client don’t have to wait for a lead agency to fax, mail or hand-deliver assessments to them. They can just go online.
“We all know how slow the mail can be, and inadvertently faxing it to the wrong number is always a risk,” said Annette Katajamaki, executive director of the Sault Ste. Marie branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). “After an assessment is received by fax, it has to be rekeyed into our database, so when I told my staff they wouldn’t have to rekey assessments anymore, they were very happy.”
The other advantage, said Katajamaki, is that “the assessments travel with the clients, so they’re not starting from scratch (to tell their story) each time they go to a new provider.”
OCAN
The Ontario Common Assessment of Needs is a standardized, 26-page decision-making tool providing client and physician contact information, medication lists and information about a client’s needs.
Participating providers in Algoma District include the CMHA, Algoma Public Health, the Counselling Centre for East Algoma, North Shore Community Support Service, the Oaks Centre in Elliot Lake and both Sault Area Hospital and Sudbury Regional.
In the northwest, the portal is being piloted by CMHA – Thunder Bay, Alpha Court Non-Profit Housing, Thunder Bay Regional and St. Joseph’s Care Group. Also participating in the pilot are health service providers in the Champlain and North Simcoe Muskoka LHINs.
The providers were selected based on readiness, interest and patient flow within each geographic region, said project manager Dan Meraw.
Assessments are uploaded to the IAR with client consent, and several layers of security ensure that they are only accessed by approved health-care providers.
If an Elliot Lake client is admitted to the in-patient unit at Sault Area Hospital, for example, authorized health-care staff at the hospital would be able to access his assessment by searching for his name in the Integrated Assessment Record database.
“Having access to the assessment can be very effective because they would know what other community programs the person is involved with and the issues the client has been working on,” said Katajamaki.
“Similarly, if the client has had a recent in-patient visit, we would be able to access the Resident Assessment Instrument to see exactly what happened and be able to continue on with the discharge plan. With Doorways, we’ll be able to provide a better continuum of care for our clients.”
For purposes of the pilot, the database is housed at Sudbury Regional Hospital and accessed via The Ottawa Hospital’s myTOH portal. The Integrated Assessment Record repository is being rolled out province-wide and will ultimately include several other assessments, including the Community Care Access Centres’ Common Intake Assessment Tool and the Long Stay Assessment Software, the Resident Assessment Instrument Minimum Data Set 2.0 (RAI-MDS) used by long-term care homes and the interRAI Community Health Assessment which is used by community support services.
June 30th
The Doorways pilot went live in the North East and North West LHINs in December and will run until June 30th, following which participating providers will have the option of accessing the IAR directly or through a portal.
The benefit of the portal is that it will also provide convenient links to other resources, such as the Drug Profile Viewer and the Ontario Laboratory Information System.
“The reception has been very positive,” said Meraw. “Everybody recognizes that this is where we need to get to in order to make the system more efficient.”
Doorways is a project of Community Care Information Management (CCIM), which was established in 2005 by senior leadership from the community care sector in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care to equip care providers with common assessment tools to manage and measure improvement in client outcomes.
