Grant success for Diabetes

A/Prof John Furler, Dr Jo-Anne Manski-Nankervis and A/Prof Dougie Boyle have been successful in obtaining funding for three research projects from the RACGP Foundation, as well as receiving funding from the Melbourne Networked Society Institute of the University.

Dr Jo-Anne Manski-Nankervis led two grants supporting the analysis of large primary care data sets. Both studies are funded by the RACGP Foundation. The first study will explore the association between multimorbidity and HbA1c (a measure of blood glucose commonly used as an outcome measure in diabetes) in people with type 2 diabetes. This will be done through analysis of the National Prescribing Service MedicineInsight dataset. Jo-Anne is one of the few researchers in Australia working with NPS to analyse this dataset of routine primary care data. The second project will develop and pilot a clinical decision support tool to assist GPs in appropriate antibiotic prescribing.

John Furler, together with Jo-Anne and Dougie Boyle from the Health and Bioinformatics Centre within the Department will lead the development of a personalised tool to guide individualised targets and medication choices for people with type 2 diabetes attending general practice.  This work is supported by a co-funded grant from the RACGP together with Diabetes Australia, and is also supported by a seed grant from the Melbourne Networked Society Institute of the University. MNSI supports innovative, interdisciplinary work that will benefit society through better understanding the digital transformations and connectivity of our networked society http://networkedsociety.unimelb.edu.au/ The tool developed in this study will help a person with diabetes and their GP collaborate in setting goals and deciding on treatments. This will use data from the patient’s own medical record and potentially other data (eg from personal apps, benchmarking data from hospitals and other primary care data) to assist in real-time decision making.