Lumos

"Supporting primary care – shedding light on the patient journey in healthcare"

About Lumos

Lumos is a new partnership initiative between COORDINARE, the Southern NSW and Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health Districts and the NSW Ministry of Health (MoH) to assist practices gain a stronger understanding of their patients’ journey across the health system. This is an ethically approved program that securely links data across primary, ambulatory and acute care within the South Eastern NSW region.

Once consent has been received from practices to allow de-identified data about your patients to be extracted, Lumos presents a unique opportunity to improve patient care. It can:

• generate insights into patient journeys across the healthcare system
• identify current and emerging population health issues
• improve patient experience and quality of care
• inform data driven quality improvement and system redesign responses.

A rigorous governance and ethical framework is overseeing and ensuring the integrity of the Lumos project.

How will your practice benefit?

Lumos will support your practice to gain an unprecedented understanding of your patients and how they are interacting with the health system via detailed reports issued every six months. These reports will be issued during a face to face meeting where the data can be discussed in detail.

Reports can show: 

• How often your patients frequently and infrequently go to hospital?
• Over an average 24-hour period, for patients of your practice, when do potentially avoidable Emergency Department visits occur?
• How many of your patients presented to emergency departments, had hospital admissions or died?

This will enable you to:

• better understand your patient and practice profile compared to your region
• demonstrate and improve the quality of patient care your practice provides
• support data driven quality improvement activities and participation in related programs
• create an evidence base to support areas of future investment in primary care
• provide a better understanding of the patient experience of health services
• improve provider experience through greater collaboration.

Get involved

This initiative commenced in SENSW in 2018 with five early adopting general practices: Bega Valley Medical Practice, Goulburn Health Hub Medical Centre, Gwynneville Medical Practice, Windang Beach Family Medical Practice and Woonona Medical Practice.

The project will expand over the next three years to all 10 NSW Primary Health Networks across 17 Local Health Districts, with the potential to reach over 500 general practices and up to 4 million patients.

For more information or to be involved in this exciting initiative you can review the information pack here, contact your Health Coordination Consultant or email info@coordinare.org.au.