Abstract
Introduction: When patients received care within the Canterbury health system the information is often invisible to their general practice team who, for most people, will provide ongoing continuity in their care.
hange implemented: Pegasus Health implemented GPVu (our general practice reporting portal) to deliver meaningful measures that support general practice to improve clinical and business quality. GPVu equally enables access to information that supports the PHO to deliver its population health functions. Each week GPVu automatically updates, bring together data from 81 General Practice PMS systems, the 24Hr Surgery and Canterbury DHB.
Aim and theory of change: Measurable aims and a measurement framework underpin quality improvement. GPVu aims to provide the quality measurement framework delivering reports to general practice teams that:
- Are designed by general practice teams for use in general practice.
- Reports are designed to be interesting; useful and most importantly actionable.
- Provide an integrated view of patient care using information collected from outside of the general practice walls.
- Kept simple for users.
- Provides information from multiple perspectives:
- >Patient level; where action is needed allowing the practice to identifying individual patients needing recall or missing elements of care.
- >Performance improvement against targets.
- >Equity of care; comparisons across ethnicity; deprivation; age and gender.
- >Outcomes for the enrolled population.
Through the delivery and increased visibility of information to general practice teams, we are highlighting opportunities for improvement while enabling a framework to measure change.
Targeted population and stakeholders: The approach has seen us develop measures of care across our enrolled population (380,000 Cantabrians). Our philosophy has been to development measures for general practice teams about their enrolled patients, with a view that if we deliver the right information for general practice, the PHO can access a rich data source that enable improved policy analysis, measurement of outcomes and identification of exemplar practices.
Timeline: GPVu V2.0 was released in January 2015 with new measures and reports being developed on an ongoing basis. Development is guidance by a general practice based steering group.
Highlights: (innovation, impact and outcomes) Information is critical to the delivery of care and measuring outcomes. Our key innovations are the use of information sourced from outside of the general practice and our general practice lead development philosophy. GPVu adopts business intelligence tools, automating data processing, increasing the range of measures reported; improved report timeliness and reducing the burden on general practice.
Discussion/Conclusions: Information a critical elements of quality improvement and integration of care; it is however just one-step in the much longer journey to improve the quality of care. Our key lessons to date:
- Data quality constrains our ability to measure activity and outcomes. Common standards such as Snomed are critical.
- It will take longer than you think.