Supporting Rapid Learning and Improvement Across Ontario’s Health System

Ontario has both a health system and a research system that are increasingly aiming to support rapid learning and improvement. Yet, Ontario’s health system still faces complex challenges, such as reducing emergency-room wait times, ending ‘hallway medicine,’ improving support for people with mental health and substance-use problems, and providing optimal care to a growing aging population. To contend with these challenges, the government recently introduced The People’s Health Care Act, which will enact the Connecting Care Act and amend and repeal a number of existing acts and regulations.This redesign provides a unique opportunity to take stock of the health and research system assets that exist within each of these agencies, at each level of health system and across the different parts of the health system to determine how they can best be joined up to maximize their value. The redesign also provides an opportunity to ask how a rapid-learning health-system approach – if ‘baked into’ the redesign and its implementation from the beginning – could assist with ensuring that the redesign (and course corrections based on rapid feedback and real-time learning) continually ‘moves the needle’ in ways that matter most to patients and families.