Connected Medicine: Enhancing Primary Care Access to Specialist Consult 

Enhancing connected medicine through new models of care 

The Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement (CFHI – now Healthcare Excellence Canada) partnered with Canada Health Infoway, the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada to spread the adoption of two proven innovations that had substantially increased access to primary care specialty services. 

Through this 18-month quality improvement collaborative, 11 teams from across Canada improved primary care provider access to specialist advice by adapting and implementing one or both of the RACE™ and Champlain BASE™ proven remote consult models of care. CFHI identified RACE™ through the EXTRA Executive Program. 

RACE™ is a telephone advice line and app that originated at Providence Health Care and Vancouver Coastal Health in British Columbia, and BASE™ is a secure web-based eConsult service that originated with the Champlain Local Health Integration Network in Ontario. 

The quality improvement collaborative built on the 2016-17 Connected Medicine e-collaborative in which 10 provincial/territorial and international teams came together to develop business cases and strategies to implement remote consult services in their jurisdictions. 

Some of the participating teams have since joined HEC’s Momentum Challenge – an invitation-only program that assists teams which have completed a collaborative to expand the reach of the innovation and sustain its impact. 

How Connected Medicine contributes to better healthcare in Canada 

Connected Medicine is part of HEC’s ongoing efforts to spread and scale proven innovations that deliver high quality care closer to home and the community. 

Through remote consultations, eligible patients can access specialist advice closer to home from primary care providers they know and trust. The process is typically faster than being referred for a face-to-face specialist appointment and often avoids unnecessary trips to the emergency department. 

During the collaborative, more than 2,200 primary care providers participated in a remote consult service and continue to benefit from it – rapidly accessing specialist advice, typically within a week or less. By the end of the collaborative, more than 800 specialists had enrolled and were consulting through a BASE™ or RACE™-like service; the most common specialty service is psychiatry, followed by cardiology, nephrology, obstetrics/gynecology and pediatrics. 

Between June 2017 and September 2019, patients took part in more than 19,000 remote consults with specialists. 

Using an improvement collaborative to spread new models of care 

Publicly-funded Canadian healthcare delivery organizations, ministries and providers participated in the Connected Medicine collaborative from June 2017 until September 2018. The collaborative focused on supporting teams in the spread and adaption of RACE™ and BASE™ – that improved primary care access to specialist advice through telephone services and digital technology. 

Participating teams had up to $600,000 in seed funding available, in addition to support with the implementation, spread, scale and evaluation of the innovations within their project areas. Teams took part in a curriculum to enhance their quality improvement skills. This included educational webinars, in-person workshops, access to a network of expert faculty and coaches, and peer-to-peer networking.

View related tools and resources

The Teams and Faculty

Connected Medicine Spread Collaborative Teams (2017 – 2018)

Connected Medicine Spread Collaborative Faculty (2017 – 2018)

Connected Medicine e-Collaborative (2016 – 2017)

¹ Canadian Institute for Health Information, The Commonwealth Fund’s 2016 International Health Policy Survey of Adults in 11 Countries. Accessed via: https://www.cihi.ca/en/commonwealth-fund-survey-2016