Patient experience is foundational to high-quality care, offering valuable insights into the delivery of care. These insights inform quality improvement, strengthen accountability and guide strategic decision-making grounded in lived experiences.
Since 1997, the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) has supported the hospital sector in their efforts to measure patient experience through its Patient Experience Measurement (PEM) program. This long-standing, sector-wide program continues to adapt and pave the way forward, better positioning hospitals to improve care quality and experience.
Serving as a catalyst for collective transformation, this modernized OHA-led program has advanced digital patient and caregiver data collection, enabling timelier access to insights at the frontlines and strengthening accountability for continuous improvement.
Today, over 100 Ontario hospitals are part of the PEM program, highlighting a collective commitment to advancing patient and family-centred care through shared insights and standardized tools rooted in best practices.
“The OHA’s modernized program has fostered the standardization of patient experience measurement across a broad range of hospital clinical settings. Hospitals can choose from a growing library of more than 30 standardized long-form and short-form surveys to meet their measurement needs,” said Sue Bhella, Manager of Patience Experience at the OHA.
“Survey administrative guidelines are developed with the understanding that local autonomy is essential to facilitating effective and practical measurement for actionable quality improvement. As a result, hospitals are applying equitable measurement approaches to reach patients in ways that work best for their communities.”
Leveraging Benchmarking for Strategic Performance Improvement
“We’re leading this work because we know benchmarking is important for strategic oversight, as internal performance metrics are most effectively understood within the context of the broader sector,” said Anthony Jonker, Vice Present of Data and Analytics at the OHA.
Designed to enable transparent, peer-to-peer comparison across 25 standardized surveys, the dashboards provide meaningful insights, highlighting areas of excellence, and opportunities for improvement.
“While internal tracking of performance is critical, what we hear from our community is that hospital executives and boards want to better understand how to feel about their results. If six out of ten of your patients are giving you the highest rating, how should you feel about that? Benchmarking offers that critical framework for understanding where your hospital stands and an idea of who to learn from to support the goal of local patient experience improvement,” said Jonker.
As hospitals continue to adopt standardized measurement tools and participate in sector-wide benchmarking initiatives, they reinforce their commitment to accountability and ongoing improvement. Combined with timelier access to local data, benchmarking makes patient experience insights more relevant, actionable and impactful for meaningful engagement.
Evolving Measurement to Meet Changing Priorities
The OHA continues to lead patient experience measurement in Ontario by evolving its programs to reflect emerging priorities and gaps across the sector.
In 2025, the OHA expanded its library of standardized short-form surveys, offering hospitals eight new tools to measure patient experience across intensive care, adult mental health and addictions and outpatient care. For the first time in Ontario, hospitals will be able to benchmark outpatient care delivered virtually, allowing them to understand how their performance compares against their peers and identify best practices for delivering high-quality, patient-centred care in digital environments. By aligning with the changing health care landscape, the OHA’s benchmarking initiative supports quality improvement efforts to ensure that remote patients receive care with the same rigour and compassion as those in person.
Recognizing that compassionate care is a critical dimension of quality, the OHA introduced a new compassion indicator to its standardized adult mental health and addictions surveys. By capturing patients’ perceptions of how compassion is demonstrated in care – and enabling benchmarking – the OHA is taking a deliberate, forwardlooking approach to understanding and strengthening what matters most to patients.
Over the coming year, the OHA is working towards improving the rigour and confidence of the benchmarks while leveraging hospitals’ feedback to enhance the usability of the tool.
Through this work, the OHA defines how patient experience is measured across the province while creating opportunities for shared learning. By setting clear measurement standards and enabling peertopeer benchmarking, improvement efforts are grounded in lived experiences and direct feedback of hospitals and their patients. Just as importantly, this work includes ongoing reflection and evaluation – assessing what is working, where approaches can be strengthened, and how programs can continue to evolve to support continuous improvement across the sector.
To learn more about the patient experience measurement program or peer benchmarking initiative, contact Sue Bhella, Manager of Patient Experience at the OHA, at sbhella@oha.com or visit the OHA’s website.
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