JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Some Canadians have limited access to longitudinal primary care, despite its known advantages for population health. Current initiatives to transform primary care aim to increase access to team-based primary care clinics. However, many regions lack a reliable method to enumerate clinics, limiting estimates of clinical capacity and ongoing access gaps.

Objective:

We used publicly available data sources to generate a verifiable, region-wide list of primary care clinics. We present a case study applying this Clinic List Algorithm (CLA) in British Columbia, Canada.

Methods:

CLA is an open-source process that generates a list of primary care clinics at a physician-registration regional level. The CLA has ten steps: (1) collect publicly available data sets, (2) develop clinic inclusion and exclusion criteria, (3) process data sets, (4) consolidate data sets, (5) transform from list of physicians to initial list of clinics, (6) add additional metadata, (7) create working lists, (8) verify working lists, (9) consolidate working lists and (10) adjust processing steps based on learnings.

Results:

The CLA identified 1,239 addresses where primary care is delivered by 4,262 family physicians, from a list of the 6,942 family physicians licensed to practice in British Columbia. Of the included addresses, 84.5% were in urban locations. The median number of family physicians at each unique address was 2 (IQR: 2–4, range: 1–23).

Conclusions:

The CLA provides a region-wide description of primary care clinics that improves on simple counts of primary care providers or self-report lists. It identifies the number and location of primary care clinics and excludes primary care providers who are likely not providing community-based primary care. Such information may be useful for estimates of capacity of primary care, as well as for policy planning and research in regions engaged in primary care evaluation or transformation.