FAQs

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IHOT is a way to recognize, support and spread the innovation and quality improvement excellence that is happening throughout Alberta Health Services (AHS).

The role of IHOT is to collaborate with front-line leaders, teams and patients to determine the best possible health outcomes while cascading those learnings across the province to ensure the same standard of care.

Improving health outcomes for Albertans depends on empowering our people to do their best work. Whether this means having the resources they need, having their opinions heard or simply feeling supported in the work they do, the IHOT team wants to help empower our people to deliver the best possible care.

IHOT is guided by the AHS Quality, Safety and Outcomes Improvement Executive Committee (QSO), a standing committee of the Executive Leadership Team (ELT). Membership includes leaders from across AHS, as well as our partners, Alberta Health and Covenant Health.

For more information, email IHOT@ahs.ca.

Right Care Alberta helps patients, families and healthcare providers choose and use quality health services that are evidence-based, necessary, respectful, safe and person-centered.  It encompasses four main areas: 

1. Clinical appropriateness: Focuses on individual patient needs, ensuring patients only have tests, treatments and clinical procedures that will improve their health outcomes. 
2. Minimizing variations in care: This involves sharing knowledge and best practices across AHS to ensure all patients receive the same standards of care across the province. 
3. Shared decision-making: A collaborative approach between patients and providers to make the best healthcare decisions together in a respectful and understanding environment. 
4. Choosing Wisely Canada: The national healthcare voice for reducing unneeded treatments and tests, Choosing Wisely recommendations have empowered clinicians to order the right tests, based on the best possible evidence.

Right Care Alberta is focused on working with all hospitals across Alberta to achieve their clinical appropriateness designation nationally.

Patients are the focus of everything we do at AHS. Providing the right care means including patients in decision making and ensuring care is appropriate for their condition, is focused on safety, and leads to the best possible outcome. Additionally, as service demands are increasing with limited resources, we need to find more effective ways of managing these competing priorities. Right Care Alberta ensures patient care continues to improve while also staying focused on the needs of our people and the sustainability of our system.

• Improved patient care, health outcomes and access.
• Reduced burden on physicians and all front-line care providers to be able to focus on what matters most, their patients.
• Reduced variations in care to enhance clinical appropriateness.
• Collaboration with patients to find the best solution for them, resulting in more appropriate decisions and care.

Shared Decision Making (SDM) is a model of patient-centered care in which the provider and patient collaborate to make healthcare decisions that balance clinical knowledge and expertise with patient preferences and values.

Choosing Wisely Canada is the national voice for reducing unnecessary tests and treatments in healthcare. It launched in 2014 in partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. It is part of a global movement that began in the United States in 2012, which now spans 20 countries across 5 continents. 

Choosing Wisely Canada has partnered with over 70 professional societies from different clinical disciplines to develop lists of “Things Clinicians and Patients Should Question”. These lists contain recommendations of tests, treatments and procedures that could be used less or stopped because they are not supported by evidence. To date, over 300 recommendations have been published. https://choosingwiselycanada.org/

Clinical appropriateness means patients only undergo effective and necessary tests, treatments, and clinical procedures and processes, resulting in the highest quality of care. 

Clinical Appropriateness aligns with the AHS philosophy to provide the best care for the patient—every patient, every time.

An Atlas of Variation is a document or tool that explores the information and data routinely gathered by the health system to show how healthcare use varies across a geographic area.

An atlas aims to prompt further investigation into whether the observed variation reflects differences in health care needs, is the result of informed choices made about treatment options, or if the variation is, in fact, unwarranted.  

Every care experience is unique and requires listening and learning. That’s why every decision that involves treatments and tests is based on the patient voice and values.

Research has shown a number of benefits are possible through the practice of Shared Decision Making (SDM) depending on factors like the nature of the ailment and the treatment options available. 

Compared to usual care, SDM can:

• Improve knowledge;
• Produce more realistic expectations;
• Lower decision conflict;
• Produce greater agreement between values and choice.

In general, the central benefit for patients may be the opportunity to express what truly matters to them. Our hope is that you will discover other benefits as you read and discuss with others on this site.