Monitoring of Primary Care: Methods & Indicators

Aims

In the commission of the Bundes-Zielsteuerung the concept for a multi-professional and interdisciplinary primary care in Austria, „Das Team rund um den Hausarzt“, was developed on 30th June 2014. Pilot projects will be developed short-term and in a long-term view this concept will be implemented nationwide in Austria resulting in changes in the health care system and health service provision. These changes shall be monitored in a routine manner to respond to unwelcome events in good time. This project therefore addresses a monitoring system for the primary care in Austria: the routine, constant and systematic collection of comparable data of a phenomenon or of specific indicators with aim to capture development/changes of the phenomenon over time. The aspect of evaluation will not be considered in this specific project. The indicators will cover quantitative aspects of the purpose and aims of the primary care in Austria and hence uncover regional differences and changes over time in health care. This research project will be preparatory work for a possible ongoing implementation of a monitoring in a suitable system.

Methods

For this purpose (I) about 80 indicators will be defined that (II) will be collected for a sample of 461 primary care structures (general practitioners) and their patients out of routine data (GapDRG). These indicators refer either to a whole year of each patient after the first contact or the years 2006 and 2007, can be quarterly cumulative or regard a whole year. Levels of evaluation are either primary care structures, assigned state and/or Austria. In the last step (III) these data is visualised in an appropriate manner.