Evidence 2 excellence: An emergency medicine quality improvement model utilizing technology-enabled interprofessional collaboration in British Columbia

Abstract

In 2007, Evidence to Excellence (E2E) was created with a view to improving emergency health care in the province of British Columbia (BC) through an online community to facilitate interprofessional collaboration. It brought emergency clinicians and frontline administrators together by focusing on a clinical topic (sepsis) and an operational topic (emergency department (ED) triage and patient flow). The collaboration was strengthened by research that evaluated perceived successes and barriers. Benefits included the engagement achieved, the amount and breadth of work done, and the level of online activities. Challenges varied between teams but in general consisted of variable engagement of physicians, insufficient resources for teams to carry out their work including data collection, and discomfort with web-based activities. This chapter outlines the development of the E2E Collaborative, examines these benefits and challenges, and provides recommendations for future work.