Prescribing Data in General Practice Demonstration Project (PDGPD)
The Prescribing Data in General Practice Demonstration (PDGPD) project is a quality improvement (QI) activity for GPs. The project has been developed by the National Prescribing Service (NPS) in conjunction with the Australian General Practice Network (AGPN). Up to 180 practices and 20 Divisions across Australia will be selected for the project.
What is the purpose of the PDGPD project To demonstrate the benefit of the activity, the project includes a formal evaluation of the impact of the quality improvement intervention on GP prescribing and short-term patient outcomes.
The project will also investigate the acceptability and sustainability of the activity in general practice. Participating practices will be randomised either to an intervention or a wait-control arm, the latter group receiving the quality improvement intervention six months after the intervention arms. Why is there a need for this quality improvement activity? CHF and hypertension are conditions that have well established treatment guidelines but have been identified as having gaps in optimal treatment among the Australian population.
For example one study found that among newly diagnosed hypertensive patients with no co-morbidities, only 50 per cent were receiving first-line recommended therapy.1 Among heart failure patients attending general practice another study found under-prescribing both in terms of the number receiving the recommended drugs and dosage level.
The consequences of suboptimal care include increased hospitalisation, higher mortality, greater symptom severity and increased costs to the health care system.3-5 Hence improving the care of these conditions in the primary care setting would have considerable impact both clinically and economically. Some work using prescribing data to address these issues in primary care has been undertaken in recent years. However use of electronic prescribing data extraction is very limited for the purposes of quality improvement and manual extraction of prescribing data for indicator calculations can be time-consuming and complicated.
To make this feasible, the Canning data extraction software tool has been modified to automatically extract relevant prescribing data from Medical Director software and calculates clinical indicators results – which are based on current guidelines – for both the GP and the whole practice