Better Connecting Queensland GPs and Public Hospitals provides benefits to Queensland GPs, Queensland Health clinicians and of course patients. The patient healthcare information shared will be continually enriched through Queensland Health business-as-usual activities. Importantly, the solution has been designed to allow other health practitioners to access the HPP as legislation allows.
Better Connecting Queensland GPs and Public Hospitals
Summary
Aim
To share patient healthcare information between public hospitals and GPs throughout metropolitan, regional and rural Queensland.
Benefits
- GPs have timely access to public healthcare information for their patients.
- Reduction of patients referred for duplicate tests.
- Reduction of patient re-admissions.
- Reduction of patients needing to recall and describe details of recent treatments received.
Background
Access to specialist outpatient services has been a longstanding and systemic issue in Queensland with many Queenslanders waiting longer than recommended for an appointment. When developing a strategy to address this problem, a number of issues around the interface between primary health and the public hospital system were identified. This included general practitioners (GPs) not having timely or easy access to a patient’s public healthcare information. In 2015 two Waiting Time Summits were held in Queensland bringing together clinicians, GPs, Primary Health Networks (PHNs), consumer representatives and other stakeholders to collaboratively find solutions these problems. Based on the ideas generated at the summits the Queensland Government invested $361.2 million over four years for the Specialist Outpatient Strategy: improving the patient journey by 2020 which provides for significant improvements to be made across the Queensland public health system. These initiatives are being developed and implemented by the Clinical Excellence Division in partnership with a number of stakeholders including Hospital and Health Services (HHSs).