ACTMed
Want to participate in the future of General Practice?
Brisbane South PHN is looking for General Practices interested in being part of a Queensland-wide stepped wedge trial which uses innovative technology, team-based care and an onsite pharmacist to improve medicine safety.
Serious medication-related problems can lead to a range of life-threatening issues such as haemorrhage, exacerbation of heart failure, renal failure or acute asthma, causing unplanned hospitalisations, serious and costly health complications or death. In Australia, 250,000 hospital admissions and 400,000 emergency presentations were due to potentially preventable medication-related hospitalisations, at a cost of $1.4 billion per year.
ACTMed—activating primary care for medicine safety—provides an evidence-based solution.
The ACTMed service includes:
An innovative ICT system called Future Health Today which identifies patients at risk of medicine harms
A practice pharmacist to support team-based care of patients at risk of medicine harms
6-months of Continuous Quality Improvement (Plan, Do, Act, Study) to drive patient safety
Why participate?
- Your practice may improve patient safety and reduce hospitalisations.
- Your practice will be leading the future of healthcare.
- Your practice will receive $4000 + a funded onsite practice pharmacist for a minimum of 5 hours per week during the trial.
- Your practice will meet their requirements for the PIP incentive program.
- Participating General Practitioners can record CPD hours in the categories of Measuring Outcomes and/or Reviewing Performance.
Who can participate?
- Practices with 5000+ active patients.
- Practices eligible for PIP Incentives.
- Practices that use either Medical Director or Best Practice.
- Practices that are server based (cannot be cloud based).
- Chrome or Edge installed on all computers.
- Practices that use Windows 10 and can identify a single computer each for GRHANITE® and FHT (i5/i7 processor and 16GB RAM).
- Consent to provide de-identified individual level and aggregate practice level data.
- Sufficient capacity to engage in the research project.
What is required?
- Practices must participate in 3 Community of Practice meetings.
- Practices must promote and support the activities of the pharmacist and Quality Improvement team.
- Practices must share de-identified data and Quality Improvement documentation to the research team.
The ACTMed trial is anticipated to start July.
This study is approved by the UQ Human Research Ethics Committee (Ref no. 2022/HE002136)
Our research leads
“Many medicine-related problems are avoidable. We are excited to collaborate with experts in pharmacy, general practice, health economics, digital technologies, data management and healthcare delivery to design and deliver this trial. This is an excellent opportunity to make our healthcare system more efficient and improve health outcomes.” Dr Jean Spinks.
Dr Jean Spinks, University of Queensland
Prof Lisa Nissen, University of Queensland
Our collaborators
This project is co-led by Dr Jean Spinks and Professor Lisa Nissen from CBEH. The project has a significant team of collaborators and partner organisations, including the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Brisbane South Primary Health Network, Australian Digital Health Agency, National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, The University of Melbourne, Monash University and Griffith University.
