This edition of Experience Exchange features a conversation with Jennifer Zosky, a former co-lead of the Ontario Common Assessment of Need (OCAN) Community of Interest. The OCAN is a standardized assessment for the community mental health sector. The tool promotes a consumer/client-driven approach with the inclusion of a self-assessment. It supports conversations with clients about their strengths, needs, and actions to address their unmet needs.
What's new and exciting in work related to OCAN?
Many new things are happening, but the first is that after working for many years supporting organizations using OCAN, I am leaving my role as Clinical Assessment Education Lead, Community Standardized Assessments and Integrated Assessment Record (IAR) at Ontario Health. I’ve been honoured to be in this role and am very proud of what we’ve accomplished through the commitment and hard work of direct service providers across the province. I am also excited to share that Jennifer Berger is the new Clinical Assessment Education Lead, Community Standardized Assessments and Integrated Assessment Record (IAR) for Mental Health and Addictions at Ontario Health. She is passionate about the work and has a wealth of experience in direct service as well as assessment, education, reporting, and data. Jennifer Berger is a nurse with years of direct service and education experience in the mental health and addictions sector. Her most recent job was at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) where she worked for the last 14 years. We are excited to have her join the team at Ontario Health!
The other exciting piece of news is that we have a new version of the OCAN. Organizations across the province are currently using version 3.0, which was launched 5 years ago. The new version, OCAN 4.0, is available to organizations that want to use it. Organizations interested in OCAN 4.0 can ask their software vendors about the latest version or request information from OH-DE-IAR-program@ontariohealth.ca.
Additionally, on August 1st, Ontario Health expanded their use of a learning management system called Relias. The Relias system now holds the OCAN self-directed E-learning course and offers refresher activities and other resources for OCAN trainers within organizations to use with their staff. For more information, please email AssessmentProgram@ontariohealth.ca.
You’re also leaving your role as co-lead of the OCAN community of interest? Can you tell us more about this?
Yes, Jennifer Berger will take over for me as co-lead of the OCAN community of interest, and she will work alongside co-lead Annalisa Rasmussen, Program Manager for the Bramalea Multi-Disciplinary Team at the Canadian Mental Health Association, Peel Dufferin. The community of interest is a partnership between Ontario Health and CMHA Peel-Dufferin and receives knowledge mobilization support from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
The community of interest has many exciting activities planned for this fiscal year. Last year, we worked to recruit people with lived and living experience and caregivers to sit on the community of interest’s working group and participate in the work. I’m very pleased to say that as a result, we now have four new members with lived and living experience.
Can you tell us a bit more about the goals of the community of interest?
The community of interest has two main goals. One is to enhance the methods that organizations use to assist clients in completing the self-assessment portion of the OCAN. This portion is optional but allows clients to identify their areas of need and guide the work the organization provides them. Organizations can use a variety of approaches to support clients who want to complete the self-assessment.
This fiscal year, our community of interest is taking on a quality improvement project to help remove any barriers to completing the self-assessment and improving completion rates. We are still working on the exact strategies to do this, but our approach will be to connect organizations and share strategic changes and innovative ideas to help us support this goal.
The other goal concerns the use of OCAN data. At Ontario Health, the Assessment team and the Integrated Assessment Record team are working together to develop enhanced reports that will help organizations use OCAN data more effectively. OCAN reports can be used for program planning, identifying areas where they are meeting client needs, understand where there may be gaps, and support quality improvement overall.
We hope that the reports will help organizations focus service delivery on their clients’ most pressing areas of needs identified through OCAN. We are currently in the development phase of this work. Once the reports are available, we’re hoping that the CoI will play a key role in supporting the sector’s use of the OCAN data.
Can you tell us more about the latest version of OCAN?
Before I talk about OCAN 4.0, I’ll give you some background. At Ontario Health, the Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence is collaborating with Digital Excellence in Health to implement the Mental Health and Addictions Provincial Dataset (PDS). The dataset is a minimum set of routinely collected, client-level, standardized data elements, which support direct service delivery and enable consistent and comparable reporting of service utilization, client outcomes, and client characteristics across the Ontario Mental Health and Addictions sector. Implementation of the dataset is underway.
There are several common fields in the Mental Health and Addictions Provincial Dataset and OCAN 3.0, but they are different enough that staff had to enter information twice. In response to sector feedback, a new version of OCAN is available. OCAN 4.0 aligns the common fields in the dataset and OCAN to reduce the administrative burden of duplicate data entry. Staff would enter the information once and it would populate both PDS and OCAN.
Organizations are making good use of the client characteristic/demographic data from OCAN reports, so we want it to remain in OCAN as the PDS continues to develop.
One of the goals of the CoI is to identify and implement ways to improve the completion rate of the self-assessment portion of OCAN. Can you tell us more about this work and why you're undertaking it?
One of the reasons the OCAN was originally selected for use in the Ontario community mental health sector was because it has a self-assessment component. This part of the instrument gives clients a voice, allowing them to identify their most pressing areas of need.
Service users can choose whether they want to complete the self-assessment portion of the OCAN. So, we want to ensure that the right information and supports are being provided to clients when they’re making this decision. The OCAN Community of Interest formed a quality improvement working group that includes people with lived/living experience. The aim of this group is to look at the data and understand how often the self-assessment is being completed and the approaches organizations are taking to support clients in completing it.
Our aim is to better understand what are the barriers to completion, learn from other organizations, and share innovative ideas and strategies to ensure clients receive the support they need in a way that benefits them. We hope that our initiative will help increase the self-assessment completion rate.
Can you tell us about the updates to the OCAN reports and what is the purpose of this work?
Organizations currently have access to the IAR report portal. These reports were developed a number of years ago so some work is being done to develop these further. An exciting part of this work is that one of the CoI members, Frank Sirotich, Chief Research Officer at the Canadian Mental Health Association, Toronto, has led a research project called the Mental Health Quality Indicators Study. The research team used OCAN data to develop new reports and invited 17 organizations from across the province that use OCAN data to provide feedback on which reports were most useful for program planning and quality improvement.
Based on the feedback provided by study participants, the IAR team is making the preferred reports available in the IAR portal. There will be more news to follow on that and the community of interest will be a big help in the next stage of this work. Down the line, we want to provide organizations that work with these reports with some data literacy sessions and support organizations on how best to make use of these reports.
This is exciting work because it originated from direct sector feedback, and we’re driving the report development work forward based on that. If any organizations using the OCAN are not aware of existing reports and would like assistance accessing them, they can email OH-DE-IAR-program@ontariohealth.ca.
What’s next for the OCAN?
I am very happy that the OCAN Community of Interest is providing great feedback and working to input recommendations. That work will continue and I can see our membership in the community of interest expanding. Another thing will be version updating. The OCAN is based on the Camberwell Assessment of Need, an internationally used evidence-based assessment developed in the United Kingdom. The next version of OCAN will include the most current version of the Camberwell Assessment of Need. Feedback continues to be gathered from the sector for future versions of OCAN, to focus on information that is most useful to service users, organizations, and regions.