How often do your patients use services in other parts of the health system?
Get new insights on the patient journey with LUMOS and improve patient care.
What is LUMOS?
LUMOS is a partnership initiative between NSW Ministry of Health (MoH) and the South Western Sydney PHN (SWSPHN) to assist practices gain a stronger understanding of their patients’ journey across the health system. This is an ethically approved program that securely links data across primary, ambulatory, and acute care and was launched in 2019 in the SWSPHN region.
Once consent has been received from practices to allow de-identified clinical data to be extracted about their patients, LUMOS presents a unique opportunity to improve patient care through actionable knowledge.
LUMOS can:
- Generate insights into patient journeys across the healthcare system
- Identify current and emerging population health issues
- Improve patient experience and quality of care
- Inform data driven quality improvement and system redesign responses
A pilot project conducted over four years across four NSW PHNs successfully extracted data from more than 40 general practices, covering approximately 400,000 patients. This collaboration provided the proof of concept for the primary care linkage project which will now expand statewide to all 10 NSW Primary Health Networks across 17 Local Health Districts and more than 500 general practices (~4 million patients) during the next three years.
As of October 2020, more than 250 practices have joined the project with recruitment an ongoing activity of the NSW PHNs.
To successfully deliver the LUMOS project, the NSW MoH will invest in technical and relationship capital resting on the establishment of a solid foundation of ethics and governance.
Key features include:
- Ethical approval and a Code of Practice embedded into the entire process
- Protection of privacy at each step with state-of-the-art technical approaches that support minimisation of threats and breaches to privacy
- Established protocols and controls to access aggregated and de-identified data
A rigorous governance and reporting framework will oversee and ensure the integrity of the project.
Lumos: What’s in it for your practice?
LUMOS will support general practice to gain an unprecedented understanding of their patients and how they are interacting with the health system via detailed reports issued every six months.
LUMOS Reports can show:
- How often do my patients go to hospital?
- Over an average 24-hour period, for patients of your practice, when do potentially avoidable Emergency Department (ED) visits occur?
- How many of your patients had any combination of ED presentations, admissions to hospital or even death?
These will enable general practices to:
- Better understand your patient and practice profile compared to your region
- Demonstrate and improve the quality of patient care your practice provides
- Support data-driven quality improvement activities and participation in related programs
- Create an evidence base to support areas of future investment in primary care
- Provide a better understanding of the patient experience of our health services
- Improve provider experience through greater collaboration
It is free, quick, and easy to participate.
GPs explain how Lumos benefits their practice in two new NSW Health videos.
Lumos: Information for general practitioners
Getting started with LUMOS
- Contact our Digital Health team at digitalhealth@swsphn.com.au if you would like more information or would like to participate. Alternatively, Practice Support and Health Services Improvement Officers can assist with your LUMOS queries or get you registered with the project.
- Complete the Lumos Consent Form May 2021 form. Practices will not be eligible to participate without the agreement of the principal GP. All agreements will be countersigned by the assigned data custodian at SWSPHN.
Technical Requirements
If you already have the POLAR or PENCS CAT4 and Scheduler installed, the rest is easy.
Please browse through the Lumos Technical Information for additional requirements.