1127-2021 - Health Care Funding Model Research

About CAPA

The Canadian Association of Physician Assistants is a nationally incorporated bilingual professional association that advocates on behalf of its members at the direction of a volunteer Board of Directors which represents Physician Assistants (PA) including those serving in the Canadian Armed Forces, PA students, and other members across Canada and internationally. CAPA members share a desire to help develop Canadian health care, and to advocate for the professions’ model of cooperative, collaborative, patient centered quality health care excellence.
 
Purpose

CAPA staff regularly use research to guide their advocacy and communication efforts. Most notably, staff often refer to the research done by the Conference Board of Canada in 2016. CAPA would like to build on this research to help our advocacy efforts moving forward. Specifically, we would like to investigate the benefits and value of a funding model that allows physicians to explicitly bill for work delegated to a PA. 

Research Focus

Working with CAPA, and the information in the Conference Board of Canada Reports, the researcher will explore existing funding models, and develop new ones that aim to save the health system money, increase physician input, incent team-based care, and make it easier for physicians to employ PAs in their practice. Given that health care is a provincially regulated sector, the research should take a cross jurisdictional approach, reviewing physician fee schedules in high needs areas and in key provinces, and provide examples and options for CAPA’s use in future advocacy work. The outcome of the research may provide:

• Funding model options that assume a physician can bill for delegated work with recommendations for key provinces that demonstrates the benefit to patients, physicians and PAs.
• Case examples that demonstrate cost savings to the health care system;
• Metrics to show how PAs reduce wait times; and
• Benefits to health care system of implementing this funding model.