Making sense of Primary Sense for general practice

Last month members from across our Primary Sense implementation team – including project coordinator Claudia Sauvage, Quality Improvement and Development (QI&D) team members Marisol Hernandez and Michelle Casella, and a panel of GP users from our region – hosted a webinar to support general practice staff (including practice managers, nurses and GPs) to implement and the new Primary Sense clinical support tool into their practices.

232 practices in the Brisbane North PHN region have now transitioned to Primary Sense – a clinical support, decision making, data extraction and population health management tool. Brisbane North PHN is committed to supporting general practice to adopt and make meaningful use of the tool, including to improve patient outcomes and chronic disease management in a primary care setting and at the point of care.

This webinar was a first in a series of webinars and educational resources that will be developed and rolled out to support users of Primary Sense in our region.

Attendees were given in-depth insights into prompts and alerts, real-time reporting and ways the tool can be used to run audits and enhance accreditation and quality improvement (QI) activities.

Given the recent transition to the Primary Sense, many had limited prior experience with the software and gave good feedback around the practical demonstrations given by the PHN's Engagement Team:

“Seeing Primary Sense in practice was helpful and the discussions had made it [feel] more simple to start.”

“[I learned] how to use Primary Sense for day-to-day complex patient complex.”

The GP panel also highlighted how Primary Sense can support more sustainable practice management.

Dr Sristi Dutta’s advice was to use Primary Sense to make these determinations, to reflect on the complexity of your patient list, and to determine if you are practicing sustainably.

Dr Caroline Clancy’s take home advice to attendees and to all practice staff getting started with Primary Sense was to “start small,” and to build up and broaden your use of the tool as you become more familiar with the tool.