CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant Fund FAQs

New and existing physicians who are live on CII/CPAR are eligible for CII/CPAR Acceleration grant funds if they meet all of the following criteria:

1. They are family physicians, general practitioners, or non-family medicine specialists.
2. If they have a practice:
   • In the community with a conformed EMR (including a Primary Care Network clinic); OR
   • In an AHS-operated primary care clinic (E.g., Family Care Clinics, Family Medicine Clinics).
3. Must be on a fully conformed EMR vendor system.
   • Accuro
   • Ava (once they receive certification in the next few months)
   • CHR
   • Healthquest
   • Med Access
   • PS Suite
   • Wolf, and
   • AHS Connect Care (only for AHS-operated primary care clinics) 

Yes, all physicians, including locums, that are live and active on CII/CPAR are eligible to receive the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funding if they meet the criteria. (For criteria, see the answer to the question above.)

No, nurse practitioners are not eligible for the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funding because they are not part of the Alberta Medical Association agreement with Alberta Health. Only physicians are eligible for the CII/CPAR Acceleration grant funding.

Family and non-family medicine physicians are eligible to register for CII/CPAR and are, therefore, eligible for CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant payments. If you provide consult reports back to a referring provider, then you can upload those consults to Netcare and participate in CII/CPAR.

Any eligible physician that has been live on CII/CPAR in the last 12 months will be eligible for the initial enrolment payment of $1000. In cases where there have been breaks in CII/CPAR participation (e.g., due to moving clinics or changing EMRs), physicians will be eligible for the second payment (for data submission) once they have submitted a total of at least three months of data to CII/CPAR. This does not need to be three months of continuous data submission.

Yes, the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funding is for any physicians participating in CII/CPAR. New CII/CPAR enrolments and physicians who are already live on CII/CPAR are all eligible.

No, consult reports cannot be retroactively uploaded to Alberta Netcare. To qualify for the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funding, new consult reports will need to be uploaded via CII/CPAR for at least three months after the physician went live on CII/CPAR.

Yes. Alberta Health will review the past 12 months of CII/CPAR data and inform the AMA of which physicians are eligible for grant funding. To qualify for funding, physicians must have an active practice and be live on CII/CPAR at the time the payments are determined.

Alberta Medical Association is responsible for distributing the payments and Alberta Health will track which physicians are eligible for the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant fund payments.

All payments will be made directly to eligible physicians through the Alberta Medical Association (AMA). The default payment method is by cheque, but eligible physicians (who are AMA members) can opt to change the payment to Electronic Funds Transfer by logging into their AMA account and making the change to payment method in their dashboard.

All payments will be made directly to eligible physicians through the Alberta Medical Association. No payments will be made to clinics or PCNs, etc.

Each registered physician for CII/CPAR is eligible to receive the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant payments, not just the custodian representative.

Physicians who are not members of Alberta Medical Association (AMA) can receive the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant payments. AMA will contact non-member physicians to coordinate payments. All physicians must meet the eligibility criteria (see first question in FAQ for list of eligibility criteria). Physicians who are not currently AMA members may want to consider the benefits of membership.

There will likely not be notifications of payment. The default payment method is by mailed cheque, but if physicians who are AMA members want to change the payment method to an Electronic Funds Transfer, then they will be able to log into their AMA account and make that change on their dashboard. AMA will contact non-member physicians to confirm payment details.

That is the intent, but data submission payments may be delayed due to additional verification requirements.

No, physicians do not take any action to receive the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funds they are eligible for. Alberta Health and Alberta Medical Association are working together to coordinate the payments. Physicians do not need to apply or request payment.

Eligible physicians will receive the payments they qualify for only one time.

The CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant funding is only available for two years and the grant will not be able to compensate all physicians to participate in CII/CPAR. Physicians are encouraged to enroll now to ensure their eligibility.

Eligible physicians will begin to receive their CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant payments in summer 2023.

Hopefully not. Clinics just need three months of data submission in the previous 12 months. The data submission does not need to be consecutive and there can be gaps between the months.

No, not at this time. Only physicians on a fully conformed EMR are eligible for this grant, which includes the following systems: Accuro; Healthquest; CHR; Med Access; PS Suite; Wolf; Ava (once they are conformed); AHS Connect Care (AHS-operated primary care clinics).

No, Ava manual panel submissions do not meet the requirement at this time; however, Ava should be fully conformed in the coming months. Once that happens, Ava will be able to send encounter and panel data automatically, making those physicians eligible for the grant payments. Manual panel submission does not count towards the three-month data submission criteria.

We are working on this with Telus and Alberta Health. There is currently not a precise timeline, but the CED mapping document is a top priority.

Encounters should be fixed in PS Suite in the next few weeks. We recognize that this technical issue is not the fault of physicians or clinics, so this will not affect the panel and encounter payment.

The EMR vendor works with Alberta Health to go through a process to ensure safe and reliable data transfer between the EMR and Alberta Netcare. Interested vendors can contact  [email protected]. A new "sandbox" development environment has been implemented by Alberta Health to accelerate integration of new EMRs. (See technical definition for sandbox.)

Yes. Each EMR offers several methods to prevent sensitive or confidential information from being sent to Netcare through CII/CPAR. This includes the ability to prevent all information from an entire chart from being shared, or select information from a specific visit. EMR-specific information is available in the CII/CPAR course on the Learn@AMA platform, and in our CII/CPAR Resources Centre. A patient may request masking of all or specific health information. So knowing how to keep information from flowing to Netcare via CII/CPAR is important.

The Health Information Act requires providers to have the information from a Health Collection Notice available to patients and it can be in the form of poster, clinic TV screen, website, patient registration form, etc. Providers are not required to have direct conversations with patients about CII/CPAR. Learn more about clinic and patient privacy.

Patients have the right to request their information be masked in Netcare. More information about Alberta Netcare Masking can be found on the Alberta Netcare Learning Centre dedicated webpage.

No. If a clinic’s PIA is current, then no changes are required. There is a CII/CPAR endorsement letter that is part of the enrolment process and serves as an amendment to a clinic's PIA.

If you have a departing physician, there is a form that needs to be completed to remove them from CII/CPAR. No PIA changes are needed when adding a new provider to CII/CPAR in your clinic, but a revised CII/CPAR endorsement letter is required with a carbon copy going to OIPC and eHealth. There are courses on Learn@AMA that address both of these situations: CII/CPAR: Onboarding (primary care) curriculum in the Privacy Considerations for Participating in CII/CPAR course; and CII/CPAR: Go-Live and Beyond (primary care) curriculum in the Provider Absences and Departures course.

This depends on which EMR you are using. Some EMRs allow you to remove individual patients from your panel, while others require you to change the patient's status to an inactive status type. Customized information for each EMR is in the CII/CPAR Resources Centre.

Panel data is the identification of who is the patient's primary care provider in Netcare, which is populated by the CPAR panel list that is automatically uploaded by your EMR via CII/CPAR. 

Encounter data are the key data elements from a patient’s visit, including provider's name, health concerns (problems/profile items), possible allergies, vitals, immunizations, and referral requests. Encounter data flows into the Community Encounter Digest (CED) in Netcare and is a rolling snapshot of the care a patient has received in the past 12 months.

A consult report is a copy of the consult that was sent to the referring provider and it becomes accessible to all providers in the patient’s circle of care through Netcare.

Once live on CII/CPAR, panels upload automatically to CII/CPAR on a monthly basis from the conformed EMR. The patients included on the panel are based on the EMR settings which can be customized.

Each conformed EMR gives physicians who are live on CII/CPAR the ability to select which consult reports are uploaded to Netcare. See the Resources Centre to learn more.

The AHS CPAR team will assist primary care clinics with getting panel ready and submitting the confirmation of participation form.

Connect Care has its own method of sending consult reports to Netcare, so the physician will not need CII/CPAR to upload their consult reports if that location is on Connect Care. If the physician is a family doctor (who carries a panel) and the AHS site they work at is an AHS-operated primary care clinic, then they may be eligible to sign up for CII/CPAR in order to upload panel data (but consults would still flow directly from Connect Care).

Family physicians, non-family medicine specialists, nurse practitioners, locums, and some allied health professionals can participate in CII/CPAR. Please note, only physicians (including eligible locums) are eligible for the CII/CPAR Acceleration Grant payments.

Enrollment in CII/CPAR starts with a confirmation of participation form. There are different forms for family medicine and non-family medicine. The onboarding process is also different, so it is best to follow the instructions provided by eHealth in their emails to the CII/CPAR Site Liaison.

Complete the Expression of Interest Form and an AMA ACTT team member will contact them to guide them through the enrolment process, in partnership with the eHealth team.

A CII/CPAR infographic, which is updated monthly, shows the provincial uptake of CII/CPAR by eligible physicians.

The benefits of CII/CPAR are: it improves continuity of care; consult reports are available beyond the referring physician; other providers can follow the recommended plan of care; it enables timely access to important patient healthcare information; healthcare providers across the system can see the patient's primary provider(s) in Netcare; and it enables healthcare information to be shared between a patient’s family doctor and other providers they see. Learn more.