Australian GP supervisors are urged to use the new NPS Medicinewise Clinical e-Audits as a tool for best practice: and teach their registrars to follow suit.
The free clinical e-Audits are educational and quality improvement activities to enable review of current practice, peer comparison and self reflection to identify improvements in practice.
Dr Bruce Willett a prominent GP supervisor in Brisbane and Supervisor Liaison Officer for GPTQ uses the e-Audits and describes them as a simple way for supervisors to keep-up-to-date with best practice while role-modelling life-long learning to their registrars.
“In my practice we use the eAudits to calibrate our team so we are all managing and treating our patients consistently according to best practice,” Dr Willett said.
“The team typically contribute a couple of cases each of patients with the same presenting complaint during clinical team meetings and we look at variations in the management and prescribing habits of our staff.
NPS Medicinewise medical adviser Dr Jeannie Yoo said registrars were already discovering the benefits of the e-audits.
“For the last six clinical audits delivered, to date, 315 GP registrars have completed an NPS MedicineWise clinical audit, which is six per cent of all participation,” Dr Yoo said.
The new online audit enables immediate, real-time feedback that is tailored to the GP and their individual patient with comparison of their best practice clinical indicator results to their peers to support improvements in practice.
Dr Yoo said some GPs referred to NPS Medicinewise’s online application as “the gold standard in clinical audits”.
“We receive positive feedback from GPs and ensure that we review and respond to their feedback to ensure that we improve delivery of the product to meet their ongoing needs,” Dr Yoo said.
“For example, functionality, ease of use, integrated resources, outputs and ensure relevance and usefulness to their practice.”
The online audit gives participants individual and de-identified aggregate results of all participants for two rounds of data collection and an expert commentary on aggregate results.
Each participating GP’s individual results are kept confidential and provided to them only.
The Clinical e-Audit involves participating GPs:
Each Clinical e-Audit is developed by NPS MedicineWise. The clinical content for each audit is reviewed by a specialist with expertise in the relevant area, and the activity is piloted by GPs and refined before launch.
The Clinical e-Audit requires GPs to complete two phases, the second of which also includes evaluation questions.
The first phase (referred to as the initial phase) requires GPs to:
The second phase (referred to as the review phase) requires GPs to:
NPS Medicinewise usually provides two audits per year to support national therapeutic programs. The audits are accredited by the RACGP and ACRRM and enable GPs to meet their CPD requirements of a quality improvement, category 1 activity.
Completion of clinical audits are also a mandatory requirement for practices to meet their requirements for the Practice Incentive Program Quality Practice Improvement (PIP QPI).
Date reviewed: 13 April 2017
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