Feature Story

MUHC partners with Agili-T to Improve Patient Care

Located in Montreal, Quebec, the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) is one of the largest academic health centres in North America. MUHC facilities receive more than 802,000 ambulatory visits per year, including 134,000 emergency department visits. The MUHC admits 37,000 in-patients per year. The MUHC’s Research Institute is the largest medical and life sciences research facility in Canada and obtains close to $100 million in research funding annually from external sources. The Centre employs over 11,500 people.

The Challenge

The challenge was to support the overall quality improvement program across all of the MUHC’s mission areas in an efficient way. MUHC is a large, multi-campus, multi-disciplinary organization, and any surveying solution would have needed to be ideally adapted to the healthcare industry, be scalable, robust, easy-to-use, and flexible, and provide easy access to reporting and analytics.

The Solution

“The MUHC selected the Androfact™ Healthcare Survey System from Agili-T to obtain patient feedback so that we can conduct satisfaction evaluations,” explains Linda Maruska, MUHC Quality Advisor. “We survey the major mission teams every two years. This gives the team time to analyze the results, brainstorm and implement change. The surveys enable us to take the pulse of quality throughout the hospital. Then we focus on implementing the right improvements for the right reasons,” says Ms. Maruska. “The survey results serve as a catalyst for brainstorming ideas that facilitate change and improve quality. Without the surveys, we’d be guessing.”

The Right Tool for the Job

In part, the MUHC selected AndrofactTM because it was developed specifically to meet the quality improvement needs of the healthcare industry. “The survey questions are very good, yet there is still a great deal of flexibility, which means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we can add custom questions to our surveys as needed,” says Ms. Maruska. “We survey aspects where we think we can make a difference, and once the survey results are in, we work as a team to implement appropriate changes.”

Looking at the Whole Picture

Patient satisfaction is an important part of what the MUHC is all about. However, the MUHC approach to quality also includes staff, interns and other departments because the quality of the services that healthcare professionals receive from various departments within the institution has a bearing on retention, morale and, ultimately, on the quality of patient care.

MUHC also surveys healthcare for its own professionals. For example, the MUHC surveys its own residents. “As a teaching hospital, we know that our residents are the future of healthcare and that they have an impact on the day-to-day quality of care that patients receive,” said Ms. Maruska. Based on the results of the last survey, MUHC made changes to the quality and flexibility of its resident meal plan. MUHC has been conducting surveys for over six years and working closely with Agili-T to improve the feedback process. “We are a pretty picky bunch and Agili-T has always been open to our suggestions,” Ms. Maruska said.

As MUHC continues to survey, it is building quality benchmarks in the various missions and departments. This gives staff targets to strive for and improve on. In addition, since other hospitals in Quebec are using Androfact, Ms. Maruska envisions a day when there will be healthcare system quality benchmarks across users. “This will enable the healthcare system to better serve patients and their families, as well as staff and other stakeholders,” she said.

Visit the Knowledge Centre to read or download the full MUHC Case Study.