Keith Thompson for Best Care Provider Testimonials

Speaker: Keith Thompson

Keith Thompson: Hello, my name is Doctor Keith Thompson. I am a family physician in London Ontario participating in the Best Care program. I've been with Best Care since 2019. So we're coming up on five, almost 5.5 years now. I am a family health organization converted over from fee for service, actually, paper based charts when I started with Best Care and translated to, uh, EMR uh, now and since I've been with best care, approximately 2000 plus patients on my roster, a few extras that are probably un rostered. So my total, uh, practice size would be probably 27 2800.

Keith Thompson: You know, how is best care affected or impacted my patients. And certainly there's two answers to that. There's my own experience as a clinician, but also the experience of that of my patients. So focusing on my patients. Absolutely, this program has proven metrics, reduced exacerbations of disease and reduced visits to emerge. And uh we've seen that it's anecdotal from my experience, but also hard evidence of best care is and keeping metrics on this program. So we know that it performs the patients love the program. And so they have a relationship with my uh RT here who is Amy. Uh And I see that that's I would call it compassion by proxy. It's a time that I don't have to spend with patients to educate them. And that extra resource of time can really uh pay out two fold in being able to help patients understand their disease, better manage their disease. We talk about health literacy and uh being able to self manage without question this program as an exceptional value. And I've seen that firsthand and what this program is doing

Keith Thompson: How is this program impacted my practice? And I can say from my experience as a clinician, it's been incredibly valuable. There is exceptional knowledge translation. As you know, we can't stay on top of guidelines. We're inundated with uh new releases, new guidelines, new products, new medications, new treatments and how can we possibly stay on top of it all. So what's wonderful about this program being embedded in my office during my clinical workflow? There's someone down the hall that I can query and just today, in fact, asking about the cost of a vaccine or who may be eligible for an immunization, let alone some of the newer treatment guidelines that come out and that really translates best when we have that relationship. One on one. It's I know there are virtual programs and telemedicine programs. But to be honest, it just doesn't work as well. Sending me a list of stats and values related to monitoring at home does not do the same justice as this program where it's one on one, it's patient centered and it really is population health at its best. And that's what excites me about this program. In fact, I think this is a template for other models of managing chronic disease. And I hope that at some point, we can translate this to things like diabetes or chronic pain. Uh looking at social determinants of health and how to manage and navigate the system. My RT has actually become my care navigator in a lot of ways which referral would work best, where should we send this patient for additional help? It's a really incredible value in participating.

Keith Thompson: So if you're a healthcare provider or clinician and you're not involved with best care, I would ask you to seriously consider looking at this program, give it some serious thought. I'll tell you why population health is coming like a freight train. It is the only way that we're going to be able to manage non communicable diseases. N CD such as COPD, which is a huge cost to the health care system by the way. But we need to incentivize, being able to optimize the care of those patients. We can't do it by ourselves and we think we may be doing a good job. But until we actually look at our performance and see how things are going with a program like best care. We're really working blind and we don't have the resources. I've often said that population health as we're expected to manage or optimize care for diabetes, for example. And COPD, how do we do that without having someone help us? Remember before best care began, uh there was an option for someone coming into my office and they were going to mind my charts and look at the specific disease condition and give me all the data that I needed on that disease. And I said that's wonderful. But how do I act on that data? And that's what this program does. It acts on the data for policymakers. You need to look at this program seriously, the proven metrics for every $1 invested in this program, the return is $6. Where on earth will we get that kind of value in any sort of uh health care systems? And certainly with the crisis we've got right now in terms of uh you know, access to care and being able to perform best. Uh we need more of programs like best care. So more of us need to participate and we need continued commitment to funding because this really is optimizing outcomes in terms of cost. Humanly speaking, as I mentioned earlier, this is compassionate care by proxy. We know that one of the problems in the system right now is the efficiency of time I speak about the currency of time, the time that I don't have to spend with my patients to go into detail about what their disease is, how to understand exacerbations, what they should do when they should or shouldn't take antibiotics. For example, when they need to see me, when they can do self care, all of that rolls into understanding their condition. But that currency of time, the time that I don't have, we can decant to the E RT and the health educators in this program. So it really does perform incredibly well. So I'd encourage each of you certainly as clinicians to look at this and hopefully, as health care providers, if you're on the team, making a decision about programs like this and funding for policy, uh Please give this a serious look. Thank you.