April 2005
For Immediate Release

3M Announces “Calgary Health Region uses the advanced 3M CRG to plan future needs”

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario – 3M Health Information Systems (HIS, based in Mississauga, Ontario is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with the Calgary Health Region for operational use of 3M Clinical Risk Grouping Software.

3M™ Clinical Risk Groups™ Software (CRGs) is a classification system for risk adjustment that assigns each individual to a single mutually exclusive group based on that individual’s historical clinical and demographic characteristics. The Calgary Health Region will use the unique characteristics of the 3M CRG software as an administrative categorical model (one mutually exclusive category for each individual) that will enable the region to monitor disease trends. The state of individuals’ health can be systematically tracked and their transition rate, moving from one disease state to the next, can be analyzed over several years of longitudinal data. The 3M CRGs will allow the region to predict how many individuals will move to different disease states over time. Calgary’s multidisciplinary team of health economists, epidemiologists and statisticians will track disease groups, such as the diabetic population, and be able to estimate future disease levels within the population.

According to Norbert Goldfield, Medical Director, 3M Health Information Systems, “CRGs relate the historical clinical and demographic characteristics of an individual to the amount and type of healthcare resources that individual will consume in the future. Each CRG is subdivided into explicit severity of illness levels that allow the sickest segments of the population to be identified. Because CRGs link the clinical state and resource needs of an individual more accurate and comprehensive planning can be accomplished”

While most Health Regions in Canada classify services, Calgary will use CRG to classify the individuals they serve!

3M CRG makes reporting more powerful and will enable users in Calgary to link services across the continuum of care to get a complete picture of health services utilization. This is critical information that will provide a foundation for the major planning decisions faced by the region. For instance, the Calgary Health Region must decide which types of services will be offered with the introduction of the new hospital planned for opening in South Calgary by 2010. Decision makers will now be able to tailor the number of beds and types of services that need to be offered based on the population’s needs and plan the optimal strategy to prepare for these and other future healthcare deliverables.

The Calgary Health Region will utilize the 3M CRG for the planning for services provided to the population of the entire region. The Calgary Health Region encompasses a population of over 1.1 million people and provides tertiary care to the other parts of the province. 3M CRG will enhance current planning models and methods that are currently based on age, gender and socio-economic factors. The CRG will facilitate a more accurate and clinically meaningful determination of the services required in the future to best meet the changing needs of the population.

According to Mr. Stafford Dean, the Team Lead, Health Systems Analysis at the Calgary Heath Region,
“The KEY is that the CRG makes the planning process clinically relevant. Everybody ages, but more information based on disease states will help in planning specific services based on that.”

The significant advantage of 3M CRG comes from this fundamental difference from traditional methods. The unit of analysis is now the individual, and not the health service event.

According to Mr. Dean, “I see a tremendous benefit for all regional healthcare systems. There will be a fundamental shift in the way Canada has been reporting on administrative data. We should be linking health services utilization to diseases.”

Contact 3M Canada PR department.

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