Lumos: a statewide linkage programme in Australia integrating general practice data to guide system redesign

Patricia Correll; Anne-Marie Feyer; Phuong-Thao Phan; Barry Drake; Walid Jammal; Katie Irvine; Adrian Power; Sharon Muir; Shahana Ferdousi; Samantha Moubarak; Yalchin Oytam; James Linden; Louise Fisher

doi:10.1136/ihj-2021-000074

Lumos: a statewide linkage programme in Australia integrating general practice data to guide system redesign

Integr Healthc J. 2021 May 16;3(1):e000074. doi: 10.1136/ihj-2021-000074. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Ministry of Health, NSW Health, St Leonards, New South Wales, Australia.
² School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
³ Hills Family General Practice, Castle Hill, New South Wales, Australia.
⁴ Riverstone Family Medical Practice, Riverstone, New South Wales, Australia.
⁵ Western Sydney Primary Health Network, Blacktown, New South Wales, Australia.

Abstract

Objective: With ageing of the Australian population, more people are living longer and experiencing chronic or complex health conditions. The challenge is to have information that supports the integration of services across the continuum of settings and providers, to deliver person-centred, seamless, efficient and effective healthcare. However, in Australia, data are typically siloed within health settings, precluding a comprehensive view of patient journeys. Here, we describe the establishment of the Lumos programme-the first statewide linked data asset across primary care and other settings in Australia and evaluate its representativeness to the census population.

Methods and analysis: Records extracted from general practices throughout New South Wales (NSW), Australia's most populous state, were linked to patient records from acute and other settings. Innovative privacy and security technologies were employed to facilitate ongoing and regular updates. The marginal demographic distributions of the Lumos cohort were compared with the NSW census population by calculating multiple measures of representation to evaluate its generalisability.

Results: The first Lumos programme data extraction linked 1.3 million patients' general practice records to other NSW health system data. This represented 16% of the NSW population. The demographic distribution of patients in Lumos was >95% aligned to that of the NSW population in the calculated measures of representativeness.

Conclusion: The Lumos programme delivers an enduring, regularly updated data resource, providing unique insights about statewide, cross-setting healthcare utilisation. General practice patients represented in the Lumos data asset are representative of the NSW population overall. Lumos data can reliably be used to identify at-risk regions and groups, to guide the planning and design of health services and to monitor their impact throughout NSW.

Keywords: general practice; healthcare quality improvement; medical record linkage; primary care; statistics.