Lumos

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

About Lumos

Lumos is a new partnership initiative between Central and Eastern Sydney PHN (CESPHN) 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 and has launched in February 2020 within the CESPHN 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 through actionable knowledge.

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

CESPHN has recruited 123 practices to the Lumos project to date.

As of June 2023 the LUMOS Project participation was 669 practices which is approximately 26% of all practices in NSW Data linkage included the patient journeys of over 5 million individuals.

Key features of the process include:

• Ethical approval and a Code of Practice embedded into the entire process
• Protection of privacy at each step with state-of-the-art technical approaches that support minimum threats to privacy
• Established protocols and controls to access aggregated and de-identified data 

A rigorous governance and reporting framework will oversee and ensure the integrity of this project

What’s in it for your practice?

Lumos will support general practice to gain an unprecedented understanding of their patients and how they are interacting with the health system via detailed reports issued every 6 months.
Reports can show things like: 

• How often do my 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 my patients had any combination of emergency department presentations, admissions to hospital or death?

This will enable general practices 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

Furthermore, it is free, quick & easy to participate. 

Getting started with Lumos:

1. Contact the Digital Health & QI team: digitalhealth@cesphn.com.au if you would like more information or would like to participate.
2. Complete the consent form, to be countersigned

Technical requirements:

If you already have Pen CAT or POLAR data extraction tool installed, the rest is easy.

See here for additional technical requirements. Contact us for assistance.

Resources Toolkit

• Information pack for General Practices
• GP information sheet
• Lumos & Data Sharing Privacy & Security FAQs
• Sample GP report 2020
• NSW Health & Ministry of Health Lumos website
• QIA – Use Lumos Report to Improve Coding of “Undiagnosed” Diabetics
• QIA – Use Lumos Report to Identify Potential Hospital Admissions

For further information, please contact: digitalhealth@cesphn.com.au