Source
Community Initiatives are a fundamental part of how Alliance members foster resilient, healthy communities and improve health and wellbeing at the population level. CIs achieve collective social, environmental, and/or policy change that benefits whole communities. They are often community-led and are always delivered in partnership with community members and organizations.
Although they are essential, CIs are often misunderstood or overlooked by policymakers and funders. Measuring outcomes for all types of services provided, including CIs, is essential for demonstrating the value of CHCs, but it needs to be done regularly and consistently. The Alliance is committed to helping our members collect and share information about their CIs in order to facilitate spread, scale, continuous improvement, and advocacy.
# A New Tool to Record Community Initiative Data
CIRT was created in 2012 for our members to record and track their Community Initiatives and was used by our sector until 2025. However, in her 2017 report, Ontario’s Auditor General called out a lack of data to support the value of CIs, because CHCs were not consistently using CIRT.
A subsequent evaluation of CIRT led by a committee of Alliance members identified several areas of concern that would need to be addressed before it could support a learning health system. The committee recommended creating a new, streamlined tool that would reduce the reporting burden and generate useable data. In 2021, the EPIC LHS Steering Committee, the Information Management Committee, and the Executive Leaders’ Network endorsed transitioning the sector to a new CI reporting solution within the PS Suite EMR.
A new CI Tool consisting of two custom forms for TELUS PS Suite EMR was released to Alliance members in September 2025, along with an accompanying Community Initiatives Data Entry Manual, created to support teams in using the new forms (also available in French).
# CI Tool Launch Webinar
On September 17, 2025, the Alliance held this webinar to formally launch the toolkit. It included a walk-through of the new steps and introduced the new custom forms forms and the Data Entry Manual. It also included a Q&A session in which we addressed members' questions about community initiatives and the new recording process.
Watch the video below, and access the slide deck here.
Questions and answers from the webinar have also been compiled in this reference document.
# Follow-Up Q&A Session
On October 22, 2025, the Alliance hosted a follow-up Q&A Session to address challenges and questions that had arisen for people implementing the new tool at their CHCs. Watch the video below, and access the slide deck here.