Supporting quality and safety in general practice: Response rates to computer decision support

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Medical Informatics
• General Practice

Background:

• Primary Health Networks (PHNs) aim to enhance quality improvement in general practice.
• Current quality improvement methods are resource-intensive and lack impact measurement.
• There is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of digital health tools in general practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To measure general practitioner (GP) response rates to computerised decision support at the point of care.
• To assess the impact of real-time medication safety alerts and intervention prompts.
• To evaluate the efficiency of PHN-led quality improvement initiatives.

Main Methods:

• Development and implementation of a decision support tool by Gold Coast PHN.
• The tool delivered real-time medication safety alerts and intervention prompts.
• Data collected from 80 general practices covering 519,000 patients between July 2020 and June 2021.

Main Results:

• Over 3153 alerts were triggered for 2328 patients from July 2020 to June 2021, with 40% of suggested interventions completed.
• From January to June 2021, 19,019 prompts were triggered during visits for 17,398 patients, with 22% of suggested interventions completed.
• Intervention rates varied, suggesting potential for optimization.

Conclusions:

• General practitioners (GPs) demonstrate responsiveness to automated, real-time medication safety alerts.
• Point-of-care decision support tools can effectively prompt interventions tailored to individual patient needs.
• These findings suggest a scalable and impactful approach to quality improvement in general practice, reducing reliance on intensive PHN input.