The General Practice (GP) Liaison Network is a Queensland Health state-wide program with teams situated in every Hospital and Health Service (HHS). To support our primary care partners and the care of patients, Gold Coast Health's GP Partnerships and Engagement team operated at the interface between our HHS and GPs facilitating representation, advocacy, communication, collaboration and connectivity. Our annual work plan includes working with general practice to increase utilisation of state-wide Queensland Health resources.
The GP Partnerships and Engagement Dashboard was created to provide an easily accessible overview of our local GP profile at both a practice and individual practitioner level. It helps our HHS better understand our primary care partners' needs and supports targeted engagement to improve clinical handover, education and service information sharing.
The GP Partnerships and Engagement dashboard was developed to provide an easily accessible overview of our local GP profile at both a practice and individual practitioner level. As the team did not consist of a data analyst to develop a dashboard, we worked with Gold Coast Health's Learning Experience and Academic Placements program who supported the placement of three consecutive non-clinical interns studying a Master/Bachelor of Business Data Analytics at Bond University. Students were placed with the GP Partnerships and Engagement team for a period of three months each, with one of the placements extending to six months. Students worked closely with the GP Partnerships and Engagement Program Manager to understand the data sources, how to access cleanse and manipulate the data, develop the layout, validate the data and then document, train and handover the data loading process to the Program Manager. Data cleansing of each data source occurs first and takes approximately one hour.
The dashboard data prepping and loading process was initially very manual taking approximately four hours each month and was open to human error. This process required automation. At that stage, a data development manager at Gold Coast Health was engaged to apply the coding prepared by the interns to excel power queries in order to reduce the manual tasks. Dashboard data prepping and loading time was reduced to approximately 30 minutes. The dashboard is accessible to GP Partnerships and Engagement staff and refreshed monthly.
