A concept dictionary for achieving cross provincial comparisons of osteoporosis screening performance in primary health care

Abstract

Administrative databases can be used to measure Primary Health Care (PHC) performance. This can lead to identification of high-performing practice characteristics and inform innovations. However, a key challenge is that administrative data cannot be easily linked across provinces. Comparable measures must be defined across provinces but operationalized within each province. The purpose of this work is to provide an example of defining a PHC concept, osteoporosis screening, and creating measures to examine it across British Columbia (BC), Ontario (ON), and Nova Scotia (NS), Canada. TRANSFORMATION is a study that seeks to improve the science and reporting of PHC performance. We used administrative data from BC, ON, NS to examine osteoporosis screening in those aged 65 years and older. Challenges of databases with different amounts of data and levels of methods development (e.g. macros) can be overcome for purposes of cross-provincial comparisons. Flexibility of analytic methods and frequent communication is needed.

Keywords

• Osteoporosis
• Primary Health Care
• Population health
• Information storage and retrieval
• weights and measures