| Summary: | General practice is often a patient’s first point of contact with the health system and the gateway
to specialist services. In Australia, different aspects of the health system are managed by the
Commonwealth Government and individual state / territory governments. Although there is a long
history of research using administrative data in Australia, this split in the management and funding of
services has hindered whole-system research. Additionally, the administrative data typically available
for research are often collected for reimbursement purposes and lack clinical information.
General practices collect a range of patient information including diagnoses, medications prescribed, results of pathology tests ordered and so on. Practices are increasingly using clinical information systems and data extraction tools to make use of this information. This paper describes
approaches used on several research projects to access clinical, as opposed to administrative, general
practice data which to date has seen little use as a resource for research.
This information was accessed in three ways. The first was by working directly with practices
to access clinical and management data to support research. The second involved accessing general
practice data through collaboration with Primary Health Networks, recently established in Australia
to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of health services for patients. The third was via NPS
MedicineWise’s MedicineInsight program, which collects data from consenting practices across Australia and makes these data available to researchers.
We describe each approach including data access requirements and the advantages and challenges of each method. All approaches provide the opportunity to better understand data previously
unavailable for research in Australia. The challenge of linking general practice data to other sources,
currently being explored for general practice data, is discussed.
Finally, we describe some general practice data collections used for research internationally and
how these compare to collections available in Australia.
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