The next step was to define each physician’s practice population.

The Canadian healthcare system allows patients to choose their family physician(s) and places no limits on how many different physician(s) they visit. Thus, we had to devise a way to assign patients and their visits to the appropriate physician. We allocated each patient to the physician they visited the most.

All relevant visits and services, or health profiles (e.g., immunizations, drug prescriptions, lab tests) from any physician for that patient were credited to the assigned physician and used to measure the indicators. Specific details regarding this method can be found in Katz et al (2006).6

We defined the eligibility criteria for patients for each index per physician. Any physician with too few eligible patients (10 for most indicators) for any one indicator were excluded from that indicator.

6 Katz A, Soodeen R, Bogdanovic B, De Coster C, Chateau D. Can the Quality of Care in Family Practice Be Measures Using Administrative Data? Health Services Research 2006;41(6):2238-54.