Using practice analytics to understand variation and support reflective practice

Opportunity

Practice Analytics – 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. The data in diverse Electronic Health Data (EHD) sets, from systems such as Patient Administrative Systems (PAS) and Patient Reported Measures (PRMs), holds a wealth of insights on health professional performance and offers great potential for supporting the workforce in practice improvement. Despite this, there are significant gaps in understanding about all aspects of using EHD in this way.

Project objective

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 information can be extracted from data systems (such as Patient Administration 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 tools and pathways for research findings to be adopted in practice.