Abstract
In Australia, general practice forms a core part of the health system, with general practitioners (GPs) having a gatekeeper role for patients to receive care from other health services. GPs manage the care of patients across their lifespan and have roles in preventive health care, chronic condition management, multimorbidity and population health. Most people in Australia see a GP once in any given year. Draft reforms have been released by the Australian Government that may change the model of general practice currently implemented in Australia. In order to quantify the impact and effectiveness of any implemented reforms in the future, reliable and valid data about general practice clinical activity over time, will be needed. In this context, this commentary outlines the historical and current approaches used to obtain general practice statistics in Australia and highlights the benefits and limitations of these approaches. The role of data generated from GP electronic health record extractions is discussed. A methodology to generate high quality statistics from Australian general practice in the future is presented.
Highlights
Accepted: 2 February 2022General practice is the foundation of the Australian healthcare system, as general practitioners (GPs) are the gatekeepers for patient access to many other health services.Reliable data about GP clinical activity is needed for statistical analysis by primary care and public health researchers, those involved with health policy, health services planning and costing, GP educators, health consumers, and those involved in the development and production of health treatments and interventions
Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) data identified changes in general practice clinical activity over time [22] and provided evidence about numerous policy areas, including time spent on patient care not able to be claimed through the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) [23], the potential cost of freezing MBS item rebates [24] and disproved statements that GPs were providing so-called
Building on the structure of the BEACH interface for active data collection, we propose developing a hybrid active + passive data collection based on data extraction from electronic health records (EHRs) with subsequent data curation from GPs to review the quality of extracted data and complete gaps in the dataset
Summary
General practice is the foundation of the Australian healthcare system, as general practitioners (GPs) are the gatekeepers for patient access to many other health services. Reliable data about GP clinical activity is needed for statistical analysis by primary care and public health researchers, those involved with health policy, health services planning and costing, GP educators, health consumers, and those involved in the development and production of health treatments and interventions. In this commentary article we will discuss the historical and current approaches used to obtain statistics in Australian general practice, highlight benefits and limitations in these approaches, and outline a proposed methodology to generate high quality statistics from general practice in the future.
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