On April 3, 2007, HOBIC went live with the electronic collection of patient-centred, evidence-based clinical health outcomes that are comparable across different sectors of the health care system for nursing.

Throughout the past year members of the HOBIC team have been working with organizations that volunteered to be the Early Adopters. These Early Adopters include :

• Royal Victoria Hospital
• North Simcoe Hospital Alliance
• Collingwood General and Marine Hospital
• Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital
• Victoria Village Manor
• Woods Park Care Centre

• Headwaters Health Care Centre

• Bradford Valley Nursing Home

• Hamilton Health Sciences Centre
• Norfolk General Hospital
• Niagara Health Care System
• Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital
• St. Peter’s Health System
• John Noble Home
• St. Joseph’s Villa && The Motherhouse
• St. Joseph’s Lifecare

Many of these organizations have already begun abstracting the HOBIC information into the HOBIC database. Some organizations are still working on the IT infrastructure that is required for electronic collection and abstraction of the HOBIC information and will begin reporting over the next month. Over the next two years HOBIC will be implemented in acute care, long-term care, complex continuing care and home care organizations across Ontario.

This is a significant time for nursing in Ontario as it is the beginning point for the collection of information about nursing-sensitive outcomes. As part of HOBIC, front-line nurses will receive ‘real time’ information about health outcomes that informs ongoing care. Nurse executives will receive outcome reports that can be linked to staffing and financial information and used to examine the quality of care for their units and for health care organizations. In the near future, the aggregate information that is abstracted into a central repository will provide the capacity for decision support, health care planning and research. Future system enhancement will enable HOBIC information to be viewed by different healthcare organizations involved in the circle of care across health sectors to facilitate continuity of care.

While the initial focus of HOBIC is on nursing, the scope of this initiative is being expanded to other disciplines (physiotherapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy) and other sectors of the health care system (primary care, mental health, public health and rehabilitation). Background work is underway on the identification of health outcomes for these other disciplines and sectors.

When fully implemented HOBIC will provide clinical health outcomes information to :

• inform clinical practice and facilitate benchmarking and sharing of best practices across health settings to improve quality of care
• provide a foundation piece (common data elements across health settings) to inform the electronic patient record
• support LHIN planning and decision-making for integrated service delivery
• inform health human resources planning and deployment
• inform public reporting on health system performance.

April 3, 2007 marks the beginning of a new era in Ontario and in Canada of information systems that serve nurses and the people that they care for.