Pen Clinical Audit

Program officer

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Program summary

The GP Association has purchased the annual license of the Pen Clinical Audit Tool which has been made available to Practices at no cost.

The PCS Clinical Audit System (CAS) is a clinical information system that supports quality improvement in information management and enhances the business capability of General Practice. It is a software tool that operates in collaboration with the GP Clinical Desktop System to present the GP and other practice staff with meaningful clinical, patient identified, information. Currently Pen Clinical Audit Tool integrates with Medical Director (2 & 3), Best Practice, and Genie. Integration with Zedmed will soon be available.

Clinical Audit is not just a reporting system. It is a clinical information system that puts the GP and practice staff in the driving seat where they can target patients with particular needs or those with specific health risk profiles. It is easy to answer questions like these with a few clicks of the mouse.

Which of my diabetic patients are smokers?
How am I doing with recording allergies and smoking status for my regular patients?
What is the drug treatment profile for my patients with Coronary Heart Disease?
Which patients with CVD or Diabetes have BMI's greater than 30?
What is the Disease Prevalence in the practice population?
How are we doing with our Cervical Cancer Screening program? Who are the patients that are overdue?
Who are the diabetics that are overdue for foot and retinal examinations?
Which patient care items do I need to complete to claim my Diabetes Practice Incentive Payments?
AND MANY MORE QUESTIONS ANSWERED..............

Clinical Audit scrutinizes your aggregated patient information and presents it quickly and accurately in a refreshing new way that is easy to understand.

There are also increasing, and sometimes unwelcome, demands on general practice to participate in the collation and dissemination of de-identified patient information to support population health initiatives.

What Clinical Audit will do is assist practice staff to assess the quality and completeness of patient information, and therefore practice population information, while highlighting opportunities to increase income from Practice Incentive Payments.

Updates/latest developments

Currently Pen is installed at 25 Practices within our Division. In the initial stages, most practices have been tackling cleaning up their demographic and diabetes data.

Along with data recording activities, much emphasis is being placed on retraining GPs and Practice Nurses to deposit clinical data in searchable repositories within the medical software. The data Pen retrieves is only as good as the data entered. Pen will highlight your data shortcomings.

Later in 2009 the GP Association of Geelong will be making available to local practices a companion software to Pen Clinical Audit Tool, The Practice Health Atlas. Health Atlas will provide practices with an analysis of their patient demographic profile with their current business profile. Health Atlas and Pen Clinical Audit together will provide local practices with comprehensive support decision making tools.