Dr. Michael Kolber of the University of Alberta Dept. of Family Medicine talks about the preliminary results of the Alberta Family Physician Electronic Endoscopy (AFPEE) Study.
The RPAP-funded study collects real time quality data related to colonoscopies performed by family doctors in Alberta.
“Family docs are not traditionally colonoscopists but we have a group of dedicated, committed, and interested rural family physicians who are providing this service outside of the major centres,” says Dr. Kolber. “We wanted to try and determine whether family physicians were continuing to perform high quality endoscopes compared to our study five-years ago.”
RPAP was a major funder of the study, providing the iPads, and helped to collaborate with the communities throughout Alberta.
“It’s a very complete snapshot of the quality, both at the time and the pathology afterwards of the procedures performed by our family docs,” says. Dr. Kolber. “All the quality markers that we’ve looked as thus far seem to be comparing favourably to benchmarks that are out there in the existing literature.”