New e-health dashboard helps GPs benchmark performance

A new dashboard for e-health measures has been developed to help GPs benchmark their goals in primary healthcare against others nationally.

The dashboard was developed by the Improvement Foundation (IF), a not-for-profit healthcare consultancy and training organisation, in consultation with the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), Australian Medicare Local Alliance (AMLA) and other healthcare practitioners.

The dashboard that displays the measures has been made available in IF’s free online portal qiConnect. Healthcare professionals will be able to access real time feedback graphs, identify areas where improvements need to be made to systems or practice, and track the results of their improvements.

Previously, qiConnect only provided measures to support quality improvement work for chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic kidney disease.

The new measures include:

“The capacity to data-mine our computer system is great and has led to significant improvements in patient focussed care particularly for chronic diseases. The new dashboard and e-health indicators are another great tool for monitoring, motivating and improving our patient care,” said Dr Alison Edwards, Australian Primary Care Collaboratives (APCC) clinical chair, in a statement.

A new report tab has also been developed in Classic CAT (Clinical Audit Tool), which contains graphs on the number of patients with an IHI, PCEHR and Shared Health Summary.

Health organisations need to have the latest version of the Pen Clinical Audit Tool (3.11) in order to use the dashboard.

Future developments for the dashboard include a measure for e-referrals via secure message delivery (SMD). At the moment there are issues in collecting this measure accurately, IF said.