SMICS is working to use data and information to increase clinician engagement in its business. Data and information is used by SMICS stakeholders for a variety of purposes. Clinicians and tumour group members review service utilisation across health services, and consider alternate referral pathways and/or models of care.
In order to propose any changes to practice, clinicians must trust the information they are given. SMICS utilises three main data sources - the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), an extract of the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED), and the Cancer Council Victoria (CCV) – to provide appropriate suites of information to clinicians. The largest of these datasets – the VAED extract – is stored securely in SQL format, enabling ease of analysis.
Census data is sourced from the ABS to provide an overview of the population in the SMICS catchment. Victorian Cancer Registry (VCR) data is accessed from the CCV. This data provides detail about incidence and mortality for different cancer types, and includes projections for some cancers.
The VAED extract is a rich data source, containing detail about every episode of care in Victorian hospitals relating to a cancer diagnosis. This can be analysed to gain an understanding of the number of patients being treated by each health service per tumour stream. The VAED is also manipulated to generate geospatial maps which give an understanding of the distances patients travel to attend particular health services. Identifying numbers of procedures performed at health services is another area of interest for clinicians, specifically low volume, high complexity operations.
SMICS ability to understand the type of information that engages clinicians is helping to build a more united front to develop quality improvement projects and measures, which ultimately benefit all people affected by cancer.