Here's everything you need to know.
These personalized reports provide aggregate information about your panel of patients. Rather than information about individual patients, your patient panel report provides an overview of the types of patients you see, how they are managed for chronic diseases (i.e. diabetes and coronary artery disease), how often they are using hospital services, and some details about their prescription drug usage. Every report is comprised of the same standardized indicators, reflecting the results of their own panel. Some indicators also provide your Health Network results to enable comparisons to other physicians.
Patient panel reports were created in partnership with the Saskatchewan Health Quality Council, the Saskatchewan Medical Association, eHealth Saskatchewan and family physicians across the province. The panel of physicians formed by the College of Family Physicians generates and selects the questions and indicators included in the reports, while the Saskatchewan Health Quality determines the data sources, calculation, and visualization for each indicator, and eHealth Saskatchewan produces and distributes the reports to physicians.
As a cross-functional team, we meet regularly to incorporate feedback and make improvements to the reports.
Your patient panel report includes information about your patient population, including demographics, continuity of care, health services usage, prescription patterns, and more.
The data used to calculate each indicator comes from existing administrative health databases, such as Medical Services Branch physician billing data, the Population Health Registry System, Chronic Disease Management Quality Improvement Program data, National Acute Care Registration System tracking emergency department visits, and the Prescription Drug Program.
As the sole recipient of your report, the patient-specific results in your report are based on your own patients.
Your EMR only contains information about patients in your practice, however, your patient panel report provides a wider view of the patients under your care based on their overall healthcare utilization across the province, not just in your practice.
Your patient panel report includes data on not only your primary patients but also patients you’ve treated at a walk-in clinic where you were the last or even the only family physician they saw in the last three years. In contrast, your EMR is created using only some of the administrative data submitted to the Medical Services Branch.
For more information about who is included in your patient panel report, please review the panel assignment methodology.
We apply the four-cut methodology, originally developed by Alberta Health Services, to assign patients to their family physicians’ panels. This method uses billing data to match patients with physicians by applying four subsequent criteria based on their physician visits patterns. Patients are assigned to only one physician’s panel during the reference period.
Your panel may include patients you see regularly as well as patients you’ve treated in a walk-in clinic or other setting.
The reports reflect health service use and the corresponding patient population for the past three years. The 2024 report covers January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023. This three-year period is also known as the reference period.
Most of the indicators (including the four-cut method) are based on the entire reference period, while others may be based on a shorter time frame within the same period. The time frame each indicator is based on is indicated in your report.
At this point, no. The four-cut method remains the only method readily available to assign patients to physicians’ panels.
Nevertheless, we are working on developing a methodology that would allow us to generate a physician-defined panel report based on a confirmed list of patients provided by the requesting physician.
No, at this time patient panel reports are only available for primary care physicians.
No, patient panel reports are only available for one physician at a time.
Currently, the reports are static, which means slicing and dicing the data into different sub-groups isn’t possible.