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Lumos

Lumos

What is Lumos?

Lumos is a partnership between Sydney North Health Network and NSW Ministry of Health and aims to assist practices to have a stronger understanding of their patients’ journey across the health system.

Lumos aims include:

  • To generate insights in patient journeys across systems;
  • Identify current and emerging population health trends;
  • Improve the patient experience and quality of care;
  • Inform data driven improvement and system redesign process.

Lumos is an ethically approved program that securely links encoded data from general practices to other health data in NSW, including hospital, emergency department, mortality, and others. This is done under strict data governance processes and in partnership between Primary Health Networks (PHNs) and the NSW Ministry of Health.

Lumos has arisen from a four-year pilot project which linked the GP data of approximately 1 million patients across over 100 NSW practices. It has shown that we can securely extract patient information from GPs, link it with other data collections and generate new insights while ensuring patient confidentiality. Lumos is now expanding state-wide to all 10 PHN’s across NSW.

*Only de-identified data leaves the general practice. NSW Health and SNHN adhere to a rigorous set of protocols to ensure data linkage is conducted in a secure, privacy preserving manner.Diagram explaining the Lumos vision

What's in it for general practice?

Lumos will support general practice to gain an understanding of their patients and how they have  interacted with the health system via detailed reports. These reports will be provided each 6 months.

Information will include:

  • Frequency of patients presenting at hospital
  • Over an average 24-hour period, for patients of your practice, when do potentially avoidable Emergency Department visits occur?
  • How many of your patients had any combination of emergency department presentations, admissions to hospital or death?

This will enable general practices to better:

  • Understand your patient and practice profile compared to your region
  • Support data driven quality improvement activities and participation in related programs
  • Create an evidence base to support areas of future investment in primary care
  • Provide a better understanding of the patient experience of health services
  • Improve provider experience through greater collaboration

Practice data flow to Lumos

  1. Extracts data from the clinical system using CAT4. If your practice currently uses CAT4 for data extraction, PenCS will need to configure your system to allow for the Lumos extraction – a link will be sent on completion of the Lumos Consent. If you do not use CAT4 this will need to be arranged – for more information please see contacts below.
  2. Encodes personal information (Patient Name and Address do not leave the practice)
  3. Secure electronic data transfer to NSW Health (Centre for Health Record Linkage)
  4. Linkage with other data sets:
    • NSW Hospital Admitted Patient Data Collection
    • NSW Emergency Department
    • Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages
    • NSW Non-Admitted Patient Data Collection
    • NSW Integrated Care Database
    • NSW Patient Survey
    • General Practice electronic health records
  1. PHN provides aggregated de-identified reports to the practice

If you are interested in participating in this exciting project you will need to complete a consent form. The form can be accessed here.

For more information on the Lumos project, a GP Information pack is available here.

A technical information guide is available and this will give you information on collection of the data, linkage and storage processes.  The guide can be found here.

Enquiries

For more information, contact:

The Primary Care Advancement Team – pcait@snhn.org.au

NSW Ministry of Health Lumos website: https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/lumos/Pages/default.aspx

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