Health Information Team

Established in 2007, QAIHC’s Health Information Team (HIT) are here to provide a range of support for Member Services.

HIT have adapted how they do business to provide ongoing assistance during COVID-19 engagement restrictions. Report Redesign Working Group update The consultation survey distributed in August 2020 provided valuable feedback about QAIHC’s current health information reports as well as preferences for data visualisation and access. A range of Member representatives participated including Member CEOs, the Report Redesign Working Group (RRWG) and members of QAIHC’s Data Network.

Feedback snapshot1

SUITABILITY OF REPORTS CURRENTLY OFFERED Overall, the current suite of health information reports produced by HIT were considered suitable, with a small percentage indicating specific opportunities for improvement.

FREQUENCY OF REPORTS There was some variation in preferences for distribution frequency depending on report type, with the majority of feedback showing a preference for the frequency of most reports to remain the same.

PRESENTATION FORMAT OF REPORTS At present, all reports are produced and supplied to Members in PDF format. Survey responses indicated that a combination of PDF and a dashboard tool would be a positive development and the most preferred way to access data.

Next steps Developments based on survey feedback have been incorporated into potential options which were presented to the RRWG in October. RRWG feedback is being integrated so user-testing can commence in November 2020, with implementation to occur in early 2021. HIT will continue to provide updates to the Sector as they emerge. Data quality tip – data cleansing

Remember to routinely check CAT4 cleansing reports so you can view patients lists with missing demographic and accreditation items such as date of birth or allergies. You can export these patient lists to Excel to help identify patient records which are missing any important fields.

Cleansing CAT can help identify patients who may have a chronic condition such as kidney disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, osteoporosis or a mental health illness, but are not currently recorded as having the relevant diagnosis in your EMR. It is important to review these indicated diagnosis reports on a routine basis to ensure good data quality and patient care.

Free text in EMR diagnosis fields can be problematic. You can improve data quality by completing a bulk clean-up of free text diagnosis fields. There are instructions available on the PenCS Help site for Medical Director and Best Practice on how to do this, along with other recipes on improving data quality: help.pencs.com.au/display/CR/Improve+Data+Quality.

When cleaning your EMR database, it is advised that patients are archived if they have not been seen in the past two or three years (dependent on your organisational policy), this is also a great way to improve the processing speed of CAT4. If you would like instructions on how to bulk archive patients, please contact HIT.

Contact details For all Helpdesk and general HIT enquiries, please contact the team by email HIT@qaihc.com.au or telephone on 3328 8500.

HIT have skilled Data Analysts to support your clinic’s priorities:

TRAINING CAT4, Topbar and EMRs REPORTING MBS Report Cards Data Requests

PRACTICE IMPROVEMENT Data to help guide and monitor CQI

HELPDESK Email & telephone support in business hours

DATA GOVERNANCE Ensuring data accuracy & safety NKPI & OSR Data quality and reporting support DIGITAL HEALTH National Digital Health Strategy, My Health Record