As MACH explores opportunities to strengthen links between primary care, health services and researchers, work is underway to better connect primary care and hospital data.
For Associate Professor Simonis, a GP, researcher and longtime advocate for women’s health, the opportunity extends beyond information sharing. She believes bringing together information from general practice and hospitals could help clinicians and researchers build a more complete picture of how people experience care across the health system.
“In general practice, we probably have one of the richest datasets per patient in the healthcare sector,” she says. “Tertiary data is often about the admission. General practice is about the person over time.”
Because GPs frequently care for patients over many years, they can provide insights that are not available from hospital data alone.
Bringing together primary care and hospital data could help answer important questions about continuity of care and how people move through the health system.
“We have a lot of questions to ask of the data,” Associate Professor Simonis says.
“How are patients presenting to hospital? What contact have they had with their GP beforehand? What are the gaps in care? How can communication between hospitals and general practice be improved?”
The answers could help identify opportunities for earlier intervention, better coordination of care and improved support for patients in the community, which could in turn reduce the need for tertiary intervention.
While the work is still in its early stages, Associate Professor Simonis believes it could help inform new approaches to managing chronic disease, supporting people following discharge and improving continuity of care.
She also sees opportunities to better support patients while they wait for specialist appointments.
“How do we support patients in the community while they’re waiting? How do we stop them deteriorating while they’re waiting to be seen?” she says.
The same data could also help clinicians and researchers better understand what effective multidisciplinary care looks like for people living with chronic and complex conditions – and how that is provided for in the community.
Programs such as MACH-Track and MacHSR are helping build the clinician-researcher workforce needed to explore these questions.
For Associate Professor Simonis, ensuring primary care is represented within that future workforce is essential.
“Looking at the tertiary system through a primary care lens changes the questions you ask and the solutions you look for,” she says.
Primary care clinician researchers bring an understanding of prevention, continuity of care and long-term patient management that complements perspectives from specialist and hospital settings.
“The exciting thing about this is that if we have a GP researcher in this space, then that also creates another pathway for further research of this kind.”
As MACH continues to bring together primary care clinicians, health services and researchers, Associate Professor Simonis believes there is significant potential to improve both the quality of research and the delivery of care.
“Bringing stakeholders together to better support one another and collaborate where we see opportunity is really important,” she says.
While much of this work is still emerging, Associate Professor Simonis is optimistic about what stronger collaboration could achieve.
“We can create a model of what this could look like for the rest of the nation.”
Find out more about the MACH Primary Care Committee.