In the largest study of its kind in Australia, Macquarie University public health researchers are analysing data from 500 general medical practices in Victoria serving more than three million people.
Data crunch: The joint project will measure the extent to which Victorians may be avoiding their GPs.
The team aims to understand the extent to which the pandemic has indirectly affected people’s health and how they may have responded differently compared to pre-COVID conditions.
“We want to quantify the nature of the problem and how deep that problem might be,” says Professor Andrew Georgiou of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) at Macquarie University.
If the patient does have bowel cancer then they may possibly die from it in 18 months because they didn't go for their routine screen.
Dr Elizabeth Deveny, CEO South Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network, points to mental health issues, suicide, family violence and drug and alcohol abuse, as well as people neglecting routine health checks to avoid the perceived risks of going to the doctor.
“We are already seeing the significant health impact of several parallel crises,” Deveny says
Routine care disrupted
Georgiou is leading the Macquarie team analysing de-identified data from general medical practices. The researchers plan to feed their findings back to GPs, practice managers and healthcare planners, so they can take steps to address the issues raised in the study and inform their practice patient population on key health issues, Georgiou says.
The study covers half of Victoria’s population – across eastern and south eastern Melbourne and Gippsland – who live across 49,000 square kilometres, involving three Department of Health Primary Health Networks.
Early analysis shows that the pandemic has disrupted routine continuous care such as pathology testing. A patient may have missed their regular screening for bowel cancer, for example, because they don't see any symptoms and they are scared to go to the GP because they might catch COVID-19.
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“But if the patient does have bowel cancer then they may possibly die from it in 18 months because they didn't go for their routine screen,” Deveny says. “These choices are some of the significant hidden long-term effects of the pandemic.”
Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Georgiou says his team hopes to discover hotspots, not just affected directly by the pandemic, but where there’s a rise in mental health issues and chronic illness.
The team will have access to data such as the numbers and types of tests ordered, medications prescribed or referrals made and the age groups and socio-economic status of the patients.
New landscape of health and wellbeing
By the end of August, Georgiou and his team will start to produce snapshots of the data – “a constant stream of real time evidence” he says – and then map larger trends.
The project will also inform policy makers and government health departments about their data discoveries to advocate for improved health policy. Deveny hopes that the data will also be able to do predictive modelling.
“It might make us think about potential new models of care that we need to put in place, to deal with the new landscape of health and wellbeing across Australia as a consequence of the broader impact of the pandemic situation,” she says.
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While the data is currently Victoria-specific, Georgiou hopes it will eventually have global impact.
“During this pandemic, we're already learning a lot from what happened in Italy and China. From our data analysis, I’m hoping there'll be a lot of things that we've learned in Australia that we can share with the world as a consequence of this research,” he says.
The project, coordinated by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, is a collaboration between Gippsland, South Eastern Melbourne and Eastern Melbourne PHNs, the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and AIHI as well as other researchers from Macquarie’s Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences.
Professor Andrew Georgiou is a health informatics researcher at Macquarie University's Australian Institute of Health Innovation.
