FAQs

• Panel reports provide primary care providers with a personalized summary about their patients (their panel) including panel characteristics (size, burden of illness, deprivation indexes), screening rates, continuity, and patient utilization of services both inside and outside clinic walls.

• Panel reports were developed to support providers to better understand their patient panel and the care their patients receive. Health Quality Alberta has a legislated mandate to promote and improve patient safety, person-centred care, and health service quality for Albertans. Panel reports are one mechanism that supports this mandate and overall improvement in the health system.

• The panel report is a combination of administrative health data and your patient panel list.
• The administrative data is from Alberta Health and Alberta Health Services e.g., provider billing activity, inpatient hospital, lab use, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, Emergency Department, cancer screening, vaccination data
• The panel list is either estimated by Health Quality Alberta (proxy), or is provided by the provider (confirmed), or is provided by the CII-CPAR initiative for participating physicians.
• Watch this video to learn more about where the data comes from.

• Health Quality Alberta revisits the measures in the panel report on a yearly basis. We routinely meet with the Alberta College of Family Physicians, Alberta Health, Alberta Health Services, the Alberta Medical Association, the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Alberta, the Physician Learning Program, Primary Care Networks, and others to generate this resource. These organizations share healthcare system priorities and potential areas of focus for measurement.

• The panel list is either estimated by Health Quality Alberta (proxy), is provided by the physician or nurse practitioner (confirmed), or is provided by the CII-CPAR initiative for participating providers.

• It is an estimate of your patient panel derived from the proxy algorithm developed by Health Quality Alberta.

• Health Quality Alberta uses a proxy algorithm to assign patients to a single provider. The proxy algorithm is probabilistic, so it goes through steps (or cuts) for each patient to produce an estimate that there is a highly probable relationship between a provider and a patient.
• To be included in the algorithm, the patient must have visited a primary care provider in the last three years at a primary care setting and be an active patient (covered under the Alberta Healthcare Insurance Plan as of one year prior to the release of the report).
• Any patient that is assigned to a provider is a patient they billed for at least once in the previous three years.

• Health Quality Alberta reverse engineered the patient-provider relationship (through patient activity, diagnostic codes and procedure codes) for over 200,000 patients from over 200 confirmed patient lists to develop the algorithm.

• Health Quality Alberta uses a 5-cut method to generate proxy panels whereas Alberta Health uses a 4-cut method to determine panel size and PCN funding. This means there might be differences in panel sizes between Health Quality Alberta’s proxy panel and panel size determined by Alberta Health.

• The PCN panel is based on the proxy algorithm and includes all patients who are assigned to a provider that is part of a PCN.
• To create the Zone panel, Health Quality Alberta collates all the patients assigned to the PCN as well as all of the patients living in postal codes within that zone, including patients who have a provider that is not part of the PCN and those patients who have no primary care provider relationship.
• The Alberta panel includes all patients in the five Alberta Health Services zones. As such, the zone and Alberta panel data include patients with no PCN affiliation and patients with no primary care provider relationship.
• All calculations include only patients who are currently listed as ‘Active’ in the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan (AHCIP) Registry database.

• A Confirmed Patient List (CPL) is a list of patients where the patient and provider have agreed that this primary care provider is their provider and most responsible for their care.
• A confirmed list is created from your Electronic Medical Record (EMR).
• Physicians can work with their support team (e.g., Improvement Facilitator, Panel Manager, etc.,) to send Health Quality Alberta their confirmed list for a CPL report. If participating in the CII-CPAR, the confirmed list will come directly to Health Quality Alberta from the CPAR.
• See: Instructions for submitting your confirmed patient list to Health Quality Alberta.

• Health Quality Alberta is a partner with the CII/CPAR initiative. This partnership allows Health Quality Alberta to fulfill our legislated mandate to improve patient safety, person-centred care, and health service quality. For primary care providers participating in CII/CPAR, the partnership allows them – on an opt-in basis – to easily access Health Quality Alberta’s Primary Healthcare Panel Reports.
• Rest assured, Health Quality Alberta takes this partnership seriously and is protective of the data shared through the CII/CPAR initiative. We are a provincial custodian under the Health Information Act of Alberta (HIA). That means the information we collect is strictly protected and confidential under this provincial legislation. Panel reports are confidential and are provided only to the requesting physician. Primary care networks, clinics, and provider care teams can only receive panel reports if the provider provides written permission for the report to be shared.

• If you are participating in CII/CPAR, and interested in receiving a Confirmed Patient List (CPL) report, you do not need to submit your CPL to Health Quality Alberta. Simply request your CPL report from Health Quality Alberta annually. We will generate your panel report based on your panel list from CPAR.

• The measures in the panel report are most accurate when your panel truly represents the list of patients for whom you are the most responsible provider. If your panel report is based on CII/CPAR, your patient list in the panel report will be updated monthly to reflect your CII/CPAR patient list. While the measures in your report will continue to be from the previous fiscal year or more recently for cancer screening measures, you can be assured the data in your report will reflect the list of patients uploaded to CII/CPAR through your EMR. Participating in CII/CPAR is the most accurate process to validate and share your panel information. To get started, with CII/CPAR visit this website.

• The most recent data in your report is preventative screening information. It is updated every six months. The rest of the information in your report is updated annually. Panel reports are released in April of each year and contain data from April to March of the previous year. We include data for the past three years of each report which provides you with valuable historical data to identify trends and to expose major fluctuations so you can target your quality improvement initiatives with confidence.

• Use it to help identify “what matters to you?” Use the data to make appropriate and strategic decisions based on what matters to you and the needs of your business and patient panel. Take the guesswork out of planning. Use the information to determine your ideal panel size based on how many days you work and how often your patients use healthcare services, learn about when your patients go to the ED and for what reasons, and what is the relationship between your continuity rate and other measures like screening rates and service utilization.
• Self-identify areas of interest using peer benchmarks. Peer comparisons provide you with an external perspective on your practice so you can identify areas where you are practising differently from your peers or your patients are using the system differently from others in their geographic area.
• Identify actionable business and improvement opportunities. Having the ability to drill down into the data makes practice change more manageable and actionable. For example, identify gaps in screening and key preventive interventions. Focus your efforts on those patients who need it the most e.g., go from identifying all patients not screened for diabetes, to those who are at high risk and not screened (e.g., patients with cardiovascular disease and no diabetes screening on record).
• Strengthen your patients’ medical home. Gain insight into what happens outside of your clinic walls and your EMR. See how your patients use other healthcare services like ED visits (and for what purpose) and primary care providers. Data informs how to allocate resources and identify services needed and improvement opportunities based on your panel.

Panel reports are useful for NPs in the Nurse Practitioner Primary Care Program or any provider who is starting a new practice. Your current panel report is reflective of your patient panel and their care conditions to date (not your actual clinical care). This is helpful information to help you better understand your panel and identify opportunities to improve patient care. After you have been in practice for two years, the panel reports will reflect your specific practice and the care you have provided.

• Health Quality Alberta can only assign a patient to one primary care providers. When Health Quality Alberta gets data from CII/CPAR there are often conflicts where a patient is on more than one list. Health Quality Alberta then assigns using the most recent validation date.  This could be part of why numbers differ.
• Health Quality Alberta can only assign patients that are active on the latest version of the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan Registry. This means that only patients registered with Alberta Health, are assigned. Patients who are new to the province or who have not gone through this process are not assigned to a provider.

• The measures in the panel report are derived from patient activity and the services patients’ use, so a provider might see patient information results that are incongruent with their practice. For example:
  • A primary care provider might see that their patients are being dispensed a pharmaceutical they did not prescribe? Why? The patient obtained a prescription from another provider.

• Choosing the right report to request is an important first step. Visit this page to better decide what’s best for you.

• You don’t have to worry about missing critical information from more than three years ago. For example, certain measures related to chronic conditions are “locked in” so a diagnosis of hypertension from about 20 years ago is still included. In addition, certain measures such as a colonoscopy test for cancer screening will look back to data from 10 years ago.

• Provider-level panel reports are confidential and are not shared with anyone other than the provider unless requested by that provider.

• Visit request.hqa.ca.