A new privacy preserving tool will enable GP and hospital patient data to be linked securely and anonymously, vastly improving the capacity to track patient journeys across the whole Victorian health system.
The new tools, developed and tailored for VAHI use by the Centre for Victorian Data Linkage (CVLD) and Curtin University, encrypt patient identifiers before they leave the GP system. These encrypted identifiers are then linked with similarly encrypted hospital data, allowing a secure link to be made without patient privacy and confidentiality being breached.
VAHI’s new Cardiac Outcomes Linked Data (COLD) project will be the first VAHI project to use the new tools, but VAHI CEO Dr Lance Emerson says the potential benefits are far-reaching.
“The ability to securely and confidentially link patient data between primary health and hospitals will be a real game-changer in our ability to track patient care and experience throughout the entire health system,” Dr Emerson said.
With the privacy tools now established, the COLD project is well on the way to beginning data collection and linkage, aiming to better show the patient journey for people with cardiovascular disease (CVD) as they move through the health system.
Currently the ability to track the care journey of CVD patients is limited once they leave the Victorian hospital system and move back into the community.
“We’ve got good visibility of what’s happening for people with CVD in the hospital system,” Dr Emerson said. “But without access to GP data, we really have little visibility of what’s happening once they enter or return to the primary health system.”
The COLD project is designed to fill that data gap, promoting integrated care and stronger partnerships between general practitioners, Primary Health Networks (PHNs), acute care clinicians and health services, leading to better health outcomes for Victorians.
Ultimately the project will produce reports about patients in a particular area, including visits to GPs, hospitals, and emergency departments, as well as creating a predictive algorithm for GPs that identifies people with CVD at high risk of going to hospital.
For more information about the COLD project, please contact Kate Riley-Sandler at [email protected]. For more information on CVDL and the privacy preserving linkage tool, please contact Sharon Williams at [email protected]