Prescribing Portraits

• By mail: All eligible active BC family physicians are automatically enrolled, and receive Portraits by paper mail to the address listed with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC. Currently, only BC family physicians receive mailed portraits.
• Portrait 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. To receive a mailed Portrait, physicians must also have a valid mailing address listed with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC.

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, approximately 6,000 BC physicians 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).