About Us
CONDUIT™ is an information network underpinned by a formal methodology and a set of electronic tools to manage informed consent, data extraction, linkage, cleansing, analysis and presentation. The vision is a spatial network, stretching from Northern Melbourne to Northeast Victoria, which will enable the conduct of comprehensive population health and cohort studies, with urban-rural comparisons.
The theoretical and technical underpinnings of CONDUIT™ are consolidated through formal partnerships and formal contract agreements with key computing and health informatics networks. These partnerships place the Faculty and University in a strong strategic position to undertake longitudinal studies which span the continuum from benchtop to clinical research in hospital and community settings.
Background
Although current policy of the Australian government encourages the use of electronic information systems to exchange patient information between various stakeholders, existing practice and service systems in Australia only allows patient data to be available as federated information, ie information from different sources made available as separate entities. It has long been recognised that there is a gap in information-sharing between health professionals – an obvious discontinuity of care between hospital health providers and community health practitioners, and between different primary health care practitioners in the community.
Evidence shows that the availability of accurate and comprehensive patient information, at point of care, impact on the quality of clinical decisions in the management of chronic disease. Adherence to disease management guidelines and quality use of medicine (QUM) would be enhanced if key stakeholders are able to share information and work as a team. Whilst sharing information federally across health practices is important and can contribute to improved patient outcomes, it is the ultimate ability to produce and share integrated information that is paramount to optimal clinical care. Integrated information is linked data as a result of combining data from different sources onto a single platform to allow easy cross referencing.
Patient information pertinent to the construction of a complete picture of disease progression and management of clinical care includes patient demographics, medical and family histories, drug therapy regimens, laboratory data and clinical outcomes, processes of care, patient compliance and adherence.
CONDUIT™ links and integrates databases
The CONDUIT™ system integrates clinical care with health informatics and epidemiology to collect and build evidence to support and deliver an integrated approach to the management of chronic disease by inter-professional teams. This emphasis on the collection of accurate and comprehensive patient information, at point of care, will promote safety and quality in clinical care and health services as well as facilitate the conduct of clinical and epidemiological research.
CONDUIT™ will contribute to innovation in organisation, linkages, priority communications and relationships at the primary-secondary care interface. The CONDUIT™ processes, protocols and impacts, will contribute to the knowledge base and build capacity among health care professionals. The models and tools will be freely available to facilitate a wider CONDUIT™ program, sharing interoperable information systems, data and knowledge with collaborators.
CONDUIT™ Aims
- To provide a suite of software that can extract data from most existing primary and secondary healthcare databases with minimal effort
- To facilitate simple, controlled access to data for the purposes of clinical care and service development, audit, research, training
- To institute good governance by managing data extraction with an appropriate, yet flexible and seamless consent process (as agreed by stakeholders)
CONDUIT™ Objectives
- To link and use databases across the diverse network infrastructure found in metropolitan and rural Australia for clinical care, population health and research & teaching.
CRUCIAL CONSIDERATIONS
- Management of privacy & security- to link data without relying on unique patient identifiers, and to avoid the storage of information like Name, Medicare ID and Date of Birth centrally unless necessary
- Quality control at collection, aggregation & analysis phases: accurate and complete data
- Validation against “official data sets” e.g. AIHW, BEACH/SANDS, MBS, PBS
- To put in place protocols and utilities to enable population-based studies, cohorts, time series, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of health services and clinical interventions.
CONDUIT™ Scope
- To link databases from hospitals, general practices, pharmacies, other health services and research/evaluation projects, and subsequently, state and local government databases.
- To implement infrastructure and linkages (infostructure) to create a virtual knowledge base, enabling access to comprehensive information to enable
- comprehensive description of the people and context of the region;
- conduct of longitudinal cohort studies of health and disease within the National Privacy Principles and the NHMRC ethical research guidelines; and
- implementation of electronic health information sharing among clinicians as envisaged in the national eHealth program. This is designated in the functional link part of the following figure which describes CONDUIT™.
