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Background: The transition from pediatric to adult type 1 diabetes (TID) care represents a vulnerable period for young adults (YA), and many are eventually lost to follow up. This can result in lost opportunities for patient education, worsened glycemic control and increased rates of acute diabetes complications. To address this, a multi-faceted quality improvement (QI) intervention was implemented at a YA T1D program with the goal of improving patient attendance and care delivery amongst YA with T1D. Methods: The intervention consisted of three main components: a transitional navigator, an interdisciplinary diabetes assessment flowsheet and virtual care via phone or video conference. These components were implemented at the YA T1D program using a stepwise approach beginning in 2019. The attendance of all patients seen between January 2017 and August 2020 were tracked monthly on a run chart to identify any shifts after each component was implemented. A pre-post analysis was also performed in new patients with a minimum follow up period of 12 months to compare secondary outcomes including A1c reduction at 12 months, incidence of diabetes-related ED visits/hospitalizations, incidence of severe hypoglycemia and psychosocial counselling rates. Results: A total of 2240 scheduled appointments was included in the primary analysis. Patient attendance improved from 59% to 79% (p Forty-two patients were included in the pre-post analysis (n=27 in the pre-intervention and n=15 in the post-intervention period). There were with no significant difference in baseline characteristics of the two groups. Mean patient age was 20.2±2.9 years. Males comprised of 28.5% of the study population. Mean duration of diabetes was 11.1±5.3 years, and baseline average A1c was 8.6±1.7%. Preliminary analysis demonstrated there was significant improvement in preconception counselling rate (76% vs 100%, p=0.048) following the intervention. There was no significant difference in A1c reduction at 12 months, incidence of diabetes-related ED visits/hospitalizations or incidence of severe hypoglycemia. Conclusion: Virtual care was effective in improving attendance for follow up appointments at a YA T1D clinic. Further data analysis for patients assessed in September to December 2020 is currently underway.

Objectives: Order sets are widely used in hospitals to enter diagnosis and treatment orders. To determine the effectiveness of order sets in improving guideline adherence, treatment outcomes, processes of care, efficiency, and cost, we conducted a systematic review of the literature.Methods: A comprehensive literature search was performed in various databases for studies published between January 1, 1990, and April 18, 2009. A total of eighteen studies met inclusion criteria. No randomized controlled trials were found.Results: Outcomes of the included studies were summarized qualitatively due to variations in study population, intervention type, and outcome measures. There were no important inconsistencies between the results reported by studies involving different types of order sets. While the studies generally suggested positive outcomes, they were typically of low quality, with simple before-after designs and other methodological limitations.Conclusions: The benefits of order sets remain eminently plausible, but given the paucity of high quality evidence, further investigations to formally evaluate the effectiveness of order sets would be highly valuable.

Background and purpose Heuristic evaluations have been used to evaluate safety of medical devices by identifying and assessing usability issues. Since radiotherapy treatment delivery systems often consist of multiple complex user-interfaces, a heuristic evaluation was conducted to assess the potential safety issues of such a system. Material and methods A heuristic evaluation was conducted to evaluate the treatment delivery system at Princess Margaret Hospital (Toronto, Canada). Two independent evaluators identified usability issues with the user-interfaces and rated the severity of each issue. Results The evaluators identified 75 usability issues in total. Eighteen of them were rated as high severity, indicating the potential to have a major impact on patient safety. A majority of issues were found on the record and verify system, and many were associated with the patient setup process. While the hospital has processes in place to ensure patient safety, recommendations were developed to further mitigate the risks of potential consequences. Conclusions Heuristic evaluation is an efficient and inexpensive method that can be successfully applied to radiotherapy delivery systems to identify usability issues and improve patient safety. Although this study was conducted only at one site, the findings may have broad implications for the design of these systems.

New radiation therapy technologies can enhance the quality of treatment and reduce error. However, the treatment process has become more complex, and radiation dose is not always delivered as intended. Using human factors methods, a radiotherapy treatment delivery process was evaluated, and a redesign was undertaken to determine the effect on system safety.An ethnographic field study and workflow analysis was conducted to identify human factors issues of the treatment delivery process. To address specific issues, components of the user interface were redesigned through a user-centered approach. Sixteen radiation therapy students were then used to experimentally evaluate the redesigned system through a usability test to determine the effectiveness in mitigating use errors.According to findings from the usability test, the redesigned system successfully reduced the error rates of two common errors (p.04 and p.01). It also improved the mean task completion time by 5.5% (p.02) and achieved a higher level of user satisfaction.These findings demonstrated the importance and benefits of applying human factors methods in the design of radiation therapy systems. Many other opportunities still exist to improve patient safety in this area using human factors methods.