REPORTING IN PRIMARY CARE CHRIS WOOD, GENERAL MANAGER SYSTEM - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

REDUCING THE BURDEN OF REPORTING IN PRIMARY CARE

CHRIS WOOD, GENERAL MANAGER SYSTEM OUTCOMES SOUTH EASTERN MELBOURNE PRIMARY HEALTH NETWORK

The problem

• Commonwealth Government introduced an extensive minimum data set for all PHN

funded mental health services across the country

• Service providers
• Rarely experienced with data collection and their IT and data management skills are very low
• Usually do not have systems in place to support this particular data collection
• Do not always see the value of collecting these data – have never had any feedback
• The PHN
• PHNs are required to provide these data to the Commonwealth
• PHNs have limited resources ($ and people)
• Data collection is new and staff have limited experience in data collection approaches

The MDS

• A relational data model with six tables
• Provider Organisation (the organisation)
• Practitioner (the individual providing the service)
• Client (mostly demographic)
• Episode (about the whole period of care for the client)
• Service Contact (the individual session)
• Outcomes Collection Occasion (the client’s clinical outcomes using one of three tools)
• Most tables are collected once, but the service contact with 17 data items to be

collected every time a clinician has a clinical interaction with a client

• All linked by the organization path

The challenge

• To develop an approach to the capture, transfer, storage, management, analysis, and

reporting of mental health data

• That:
• Clinicians can understand and input valid and correct information
• That meets the PHN’s reporting requirements
• That can be used to provide
• Options:
• Buy an off the shelf product
• Engage someone to do it for us
• Do it ourselves
• Constraints:
• Very short development time
• Very limited funding and capacity
• Unknown and changing rules (data elements, business rules, definitions)

The approach

• Needed not only the most technically sound solution, but also one that would be used

and provide high quality business information

• Executive wanted
• Value for money
• High quality and timely reporting
• Flexibility and optionality
• Happy, engaged, capable staff
• Principles
• Let clinicians get on with their job – data collection is our problem, not theirs
• KiSS
• Open source (where possible)
• More cost effective
• More flexible and customisable
• BUT greater learning curve (requires time and talent)

The solution

• Rather than talk about it, we thought we’d show it to you...

The Solution

The outcome

• Developed new skills – SQL, Python (incl Flask, Jupyter, pandas), d3, git
• Can change things easily to respond to new requirements
• Can automate the boring stuff
• Automatically check monthly data submissions for each provider contract (used to take the

provider, contract manager, data team and finance team significant time)

• More accurate, errors picked up more quickly, data is more meaningful
• Providers received reports for the first time and started to see the benefit of the data
• The PHN could monitor and manage provider performance and make informed

business decisions

• Department received higher quality data