Webinar Wednesday - A/Prof Rachael Moorin
Webinar Wednesday - A/Prof Rachael Moorin
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Webinar Wednesday - 2 October - 12noon AEST
Use of linked administrative data to evaluate continuity of primary care
A/Prof Rachael Moorin, Curtin University
For the next few weeks, on a Wednesday lunch time, we will bring to you researchers who have used our PHRN network to assist with data linkage and their specific research.
This week we bring to you Associate Professor Rachael Moorin from Curtin University. This webinar will showcase work undertaken as part of a NHMRC funded project grant that used administrative and self-reported data from the 45 and Up Study and WA whole-of-population linked data to evaluate the influence of patterns of primary care contact on potentially preventable hospitalisations.
At a time of increasing pressure on our public hospital system, it is of major concern that a considerable number of admissions to hospitals and emergency department presentations are potentially preventable. These health care contacts represent significant cost to the Australian health system, which has finite resources to devote to ever increasing and varied demands. One approach to reduce this unsustainable demand has been to shift service delivery from the acute to the primary health care sector. For chronic conditions such as diabetes it is thought that a shift in focus can delay or prevent the onset of complications and reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations. This has been the driver of many policies aimed at increasing regular contact with a GP. Currently there is limited information regarding patterns of accessing primary care (eg frequency, regularity or continuity of provider) and to what degree they translate into better health outcomes.
The webinar will include four related pieces of work beginning with introducing the concept of regularity of contact as the measure of longitudinal continuity and our work developing a modified regularity index that corrects for the correlation with frequency of GP contact. This will be followed by two examples of work using this metric to (i) evaluate its impact on diabetes-related hospitalisations and (ii) ‘high use’ hospitalisation and readmissions. The webinar will then present work undertaken recently by a recently completed PhD student in developing a new measure of continuity that incorporates a time-limited protective effect provided by contact with a GP. The webinar will conclude with an overview of the next steps for this project including planned use of our linked WA whole-of-population data that includes both a de-identified provider and practice identifier.