MONITORING PRIMARY CARE - DEVELOPMENT OF DATA BASED INDICATORS FOR THE AUSTRIAN HEALTH SYSTEM

Purpose: Austrias national commission of the Bundes-Zielsteuerung developed the concept for a multi-professional and interdisciplinary primary care in Austria, „Das Team rund um den Hausarzt“ in 2014. Pilot projects are developed short-term and in a long-term view this concept will be implemented nationwide in Austria resulting in changes in the health care system and health service provision. Changes shall be monitored in a routine manner to respond to unwelcome events in good time. This project addresses a monitoring system for the primary care in Austria: routine, constant and systematic collection of comparable data of a phenomenon or of specific indicators with aim to capture development/changes of the phenomenon over time. The aspect of evaluation will not be considered in this project. The indicators will cover quantitative aspects of the purpose and aims of the primary care in Austria and hence uncover regional differences and changes over time. This research project will be preparatory work for a possible ongoing implementation of a systematic monitoring.

Method(s): For this purpose (I) about 80 indicators were defined that (II) are collected for a sample of 461 primary care structures (general practitioners) and their patients out of routine data (GapDRG). These indicators refer either to a whole year of each patient after the first contact or the years 2006 and 2007, can be quarterly cumulative or regard a whole year. Levels of evaluation are either primary care structures, assigned state and/or Austria. In the last step (III) these data was visualised in an appropriate manner to analyse and select useful indicators with mehtod of visual computing.

Result(s): The test data were processed so that multiple perspectives are available for all indicators. The data can therefore be considered cumulatively or not aggregated on different evaluation levels. Using both possibilities most effective indicators, based on real data, could be evaluated. However, it was shown that for the purposes of visualization often not aggregated indicators are favourable and details, structures and developments are better represented.

Conclusion(s): Based on the results, visualisations and the comprehensive and multidisciplinary study of the issue the results may provide a basis for a potential operational implementation of monitoring primary care. Due to the imminent change in Austrian health system the initiated topic is dedicated to make an appropriate baseline survey.