Data Driven Quality Improvement

Research Overview

More than four in five Australians visit their GP once per year, and 2 million attend every week. As medical knowledge continues to increase at an exponential rate it is critical that this knowledge is translated effectively into the general practice setting.
Our program aims to facilitate quality and system improvement in general practice using a data-driven and integrated knowledge translation approach. We are a multidisciplinary team that works closely with health informaticians, analyst programmers and other key technical staff to develop technology, study factors critical to its implementation and evaluate its effectiveness.

The program currently has three main themes:

• Future Health Today: FHT is a proactive digital health intervention that uses data from health records to automate the detection of chronic disease and provide new opportunities for early intervention and improved health outcomes. This program is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne and Western Health.
• Antimicrobial stewardship: Working in collaboration with the National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship we co-design, implement and evaluate strategies for optimising appropriate antimicrobial prescribing in general practice to reduce the development of antimicrobial resistance and improve patient safety.
• Analysis of general practice and health data: We undertake research using primary care data to describe and evaluate general practice activity in order to inform quality improvement and service optimisation, as well as to develop risk prediction tools that can be incorporated into general practice.

Staff

Dr Ruby Biezen - Senior Research Fellow
Ms Laura van Rooyen - Program Coordinator, Future Health Today 
Ms Barbara Hunter - Qualitative Research Fellow
Ms Kaleswari Somasundaram - Research Assistant
Dr Andrew Donald - GP Research Fellow
Dr Rita McMorrow - Research Fellow
Ms Natali Coric - Research Assistant
Dr Matthew Suen - Research Fellow 
Dr Tim Monaghan - Research Fellow – Torch Recruit

Collaborators

Western Health
Kidney Health Australia
Diabetes Victoria
HeLEX@Melbourne
HABIC R2
National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship
Therapeutic Guidelines
North West Melbourne Primary Health Network
OPUS CRE, Department of Surgery, St Vincent’s Hospital
NPS MedicineWise
Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow
Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto
Altona North Medical Group