Better prescribing, better health
The Portrait program provides BC clinicians with timely evidence, personalized prescribing data, and recommendations to support better prescribing and better health for patients.
The Portrait program provides BC clinicians with timely evidence, personalized prescribing data, and recommendations to support better prescribing and better health for patients.
Login/Sign up for Portrait
Access your confidential prescribing Portraits via our secure online portal
The Therapeutics Initiative produces at least two Portrait topics each year. We select topics that:
Portraits provide evidence-based practice suggestions along with a snapshot of your recent prescribing and a comparison with other BC clinicians.
Portrait topics
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:
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.
Please get in touch if you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback about the Portrait program.
If you wish to stop receiving your personal prescribing Portraits, you may opt out of the program. We will also exclude your data from our evaluations. You can opt back into the program at any time.