Transcript for Lumos in action.
Lumos enables us the ability to understand exactly what happens at each touchpoint of the healthcare system so that we can actually start to influence our patient's journeys.
We know from our practice data that one of the most significant reasons for why our patients end up in hospital is because of cardiovascular disease. We also know that our patients often end up in hospital as a complication from their diabetes. The third thing we know out of this is that actually some of these patients are being diagnosed with diabetes on arrival to hospital. So that means for us, we've missed something somewhere that's meant that we haven't identified opportunities for improvements in their care. Now we go back as a team and as part of our team meetings we look at this data and see where exactly we need to invest our efforts in order to prevent them from ending up in hospital. Now the important part of that is that it enables team-based care in a way that we haven't been able to enable before. In these meetings we have our nurses, our allied health provider (we have a dietician onsite here), and our reception team as well as our GPs to get together [and] look at this information and see exactly what the reasons might be for people ending up in hospital. We go back and say, for example, build diabetes clinics around that. Now our diabetes work is quite significant as a practice, we partner with Western Sydney LHD in their case conferencing work and we have endocrinologists, diabetes educators, come into the practice to provide multidisciplinary care to our patients. That's all well and good, we've been doing that for a while, but we haven't been able to measure the impact. We haven't been able to show that that work has actually stopped people from arriving at hospital. Now that we have Lumos data and we're comparing reports one after the other, we're seeing the improvement and we can now say with a lot more confidence that what we're doing is actually working for us.
If we look at Lumos data in terms of what are the benefits for general practice, I just think this is a really unique opportunity to understand what your practice is doing and the healthcare needs. So the data helps you understand…are you looking after a population that's younger than most other practices? And so the needs of the services that you need to have access to are obviously quite unique vs the practice that has got far older patients. The other thing is do you have patients that have far more chronic mental health? And that was one thing we found in our data was we were amazed by many patients of ours actually have mental health illness that actually do need to access the services in NSW. Because we often feel that our patients don't get enough access to mental health services, so it was quite fascinating to see that in fact, we access a lot more. So again that reinforced to us how much mental illness we look after. So it was a bit of a pat on the back as well as understanding that this is a big burden of disease that we do have to look after, so make sure that we're actually upskilling the GPs, keeping them supported, and making sure that we understand what services we can actually access easily when the patients really need them.
