Using practice analytics to understand variation and support reflective practice

Opportunity 

Healthcare organisations generate large volumes of electronic health data from systems such as Patient Administrative Systems (PAS) and Patient Reported Measures (PRMs). This data holds a wealth of insights on health professional performance and offers great potential for supporting the workforce in practice improvement. However, clinicians often struggle to access and use these data effectively for learning and improvement. 

Practice Analytics is a developing area of digital health research and development that harnesses workplace data to engage health professionals in reflective practice and learning for the optimisation of patient care. But there are still significant gaps in understanding about many aspects of using data in electronic medical records in this way.  

Objectives 

This project explored the role data collected through various systems in hospitals can play in supporting reflective practice by health professionals to improve health outcomes for patients.

Program objectives were distributed across workstreams focusing on different aspects of Practice Analytics across a range of primary clinical areas, including: 

• how meaningful information can be extracted from data systems to be used by clinical teams to engage in reflective practice. 
• utilising co-design and engagement with practitioners to examine ways that clinical teams can use this data to reduce variation and support ongoing performance improvement. 
• developing analytical methods, dashboards and AI tools that generate useful performance insights and support reflection and learning. 
• exploring ethical, legal and governance considerations of using this data for use in individual and organisational reflective practice. 
• developing tools and pathways for research findings to be adopted in practice.