AIMS Data & Resources

The Assurance and Improvement in Medication Safety (AIMS) Program is a mandatory medication safety program for community pharmacies in Ontario. It supports continuous quality improvement on the premise that identifying mistakes and learning from them fosters a safety culture and reduces risk of harm to patients. As part of the program, pharmacies are expected to record medication events — incidents and “good catches” — into a third-party platform. By recording this information, pharmacies can identify how and when errors are occurring and how best to prevent them. This knowledge can inform changes to their environment and processes.

Data are self-reported and individual pharmacies only have access to the details related to their own medication events; the third-party platform collects this information and shares aggregate and de-identified data with the College. The College then collaborates with health system partners with data analytics expertise to glean insights from the anonymous data. The anonymity of the program is crucial to creating a safety culture where individuals are comfortable bringing forward medication incidents without fear of punitive outcomes.

The College is committed sharing the data made available to them in a way that can assist with quality improvement initiatives. Since the inception of the program, the College has shared data related to the following event recording fields available through the AIMS Program:

• Number of events
• Number of pharmacies recording
• Harm level
• Events by what happened
• Events by why it happened
• Events by medication system stage

Details about the individual fields are outlined below. It is important to note the College does not independently verify or validate the data in any way, nor does that College have access to any detailed information related to specific incidents reported through the platform. The College transparently shares back data with pharmacies with the goal of highlighting trends and patterns and making practice recommendations to reduce risks, and with the view that learning from medication events makes pharmacies safer.