Teesside Primary Care Informatics providing holistic support for practices

Teesside Informatics 2004

Teesside Primary Care Informatics (TPCI) was established to offer access to high quality, resource-effective support, providing ongoing improvements in data quality and developing information proficiency skills at both an individual and GP practice level.

Hosted by North Tees Primary Care Trust (now North Tees Teaching PCT), the TPCI covers 59 general practices with a population of approximately 400,000 people across three PCTs: Hartlepool, Langbaurgh and North Tees.

TPCI takes a holistic approach to providing its support, with data and information quality at its heart. The service has enabled practices to make significant improvements and, most importantly, bring those practices with the least resources up to speed. Its core work supports both local and national initiatives - including PRIMIS+. Head of the TPCI, Dr David Simpson has been developing a local initiative using Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques to help practices identify data and information quality issues. This type of statistical analysis is a viable alternative to having to compare prevalence or simple league tables (commonly-used analysis tools).

It allows for variations within the data to be identified either over time or across a number of participants. Using locally developed software to run the SPC analysis, the TPCI regularly extracts, analyses and feeds back the data to participating practices.

Dr Simpson has recently had a paper outlining the work of the TPCI accepted for publication by the journal 'Quality in Primary Care'. The paper discusses using Statistical Process Control techniques to support data quality and information proficiency.

Dr Simpson commented: "The approach has been positively accepted by all users and promotes both clinical engagement and dialogue. One example of the successful implementation of this mechanism is when the variation was identified in a practice involved in the PCT-wide data extraction around coronary heart disease. SPC charts highlighted a fundamental problem concerning an over-recording of ischaemic heart disease." Further work with this particular practice solved the problem and the analysis was repeated. As an added advantage, key personnel were shown how beneficial the work had been and how it had supported high quality health care.

The TPCI has further plans to continue developing the software to increase ease of use and allow interactive access via the TPCI website: www.PrimaryCareInformatics.co.uk.