Prescribing Portraits

• By paper mail (ended in 2023): Until recently all eligible active BC family physicians were automatically enrolled, and received Portraits by paper mail to the address listed with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC. We are no longer sending new Portraits by paper mail and encourage clinicians to register online to continue to receive Portraits.
• Online: Both BC family physicians and nurse practitioners can sign up to access confidential prescribing Portraits via our convenient and secure online portal.

Portraits are available to BC general practice physicians and nurse practitioners with an active practice during the Portrait period. A Portrait for dentists has also been developed as part of a project in partnership with BC Centre for Disease Control.

Yes. We follow the Ministry of Health’s strict privacy protocols to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of your Portraits. Administrative health data used to create Portraits use encrypted patient identifiers, so there is no way to identify individual patients in the data. Graphs containing fewer than 6 patients are masked to prevent possible identification due to small numbers.

During every aspect of production and delivery, your prescribing data are completely confidential and protected. Portraits are assigned a random number throughout production, and printed Portraits are sealed within a Privacy Envelope before matching to the appropriate name and address. No one except you sees your prescribing data alongside your name.

Portraits are generated using administrative health data held in the BC Ministry of Health’s secure data system. This includes de-identified PharmaNet, Medical Services Plan (MSP) and hospital data.

We are committed to evaluating how well Portrait leads to changes in prescribing and improving patient outcomes. For each Portrait topic, clinicians are randomly divided into groups that receive the Portrait at different times. This “designed delay” allows us to evaluate the impact of Portraits on prescribing at an aggregate level across the province. Our evaluations are always population level, and never look at individual physician prescribing. The University of British Columbia Clinical Ethics Review Board oversees our evaluations.

You can claim Mainpro+® Linking Learning or self-learning credits for reflecting on your Portraits. For more information, download UBC CPD’s guide: How to Claim Self-Learning Credits (PDF).

There are several reasons why your account may state “No individual Portrait available” when you log in:

• You are a newly registered clinician or your practice has been inactive recently, and you do not have data during the period covered by the Portrait.
• Your prescribing data may not meet the inclusion criteria. View sample portrait webpages for more information here.

Having no individual Portrait is not an indication of ineligibility generally, but rather a matter of data availability for a specific Portrait topic.

Please note that if you do not have an individual Portrait, the sample Portrait and associated Therapeutics Letter provide relevant and practical prescribing information. We are also working on improvements to the program with interactive online Portraits and additional practical resources that will support your practice.