What is PIP QI?
The Quality Improvement (QI) Incentive under the Practice Incentives Program (PIP) aims to recognise and support accredited practices that commit to improving the care they provide to their patients. A practice can utilise the clinical information they have about their own communities and their knowledge of the particular needs of their own patients to develop innovative strategies to drive improvement. A payment is made to general practices for activities that support continuous quality improvement.
To Qualify for a PIP QI Incentive Payment
There are two components a practice needs to meet to qualify for a PIP QI Incentive payment:
1. Provide PIP Eligible Data Set to your local PHN
The PIP Eligible Data Set is the data collected against specified Improvement Measures. Practices must submit this data to the PHN on a quarterly basis. We will use this de-identified data to help you identify key priority areas and quality improvement activities.
2. Participate in Continuous Quality Improvement
Practices must undertake continuous quality improvement activities. These activities may be in relation to the specified Improvement Measures however there are no set targets for these. Alternatively, practices may focus on other areas as informed by their practice data and needs of their practice population.
What is our role in the PIP QI program?
Like all Primary Health Networks nationwide, we are responsible for receiving the PIP Eligible Data Set from participating local practices (for us, that is general practices in the Nepean Blue Mountains region), and for providing a report to the Department of Health that confirms the practices that successfully extracted data for the quarter.
We will share the de-identified aggregated data with the national data custodian – the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) – for national level analysis and research.
We is also able to support practices with quality improvement activities.
What will the PIP Eligible Data Set – and therefore my practice’s data – be used for?
Under the guidelines of the program, the PIP Eligible Data Set can only be used for the purposes of:
- Improving the quality of care and patient outcomes
- Improving the capacity for general practices to benchmark their activities against peers on an agreed set of improvement measures
- Providing nationally consistent, comparable data against specified quality improvement measures to create regional and national health data sets
- Contributing to service planning and population health mapping at different levels including PHN boundaries, local health districts, jurisdictional boundaries, and national, and
- Confirming participant eligibility for the receipt of Commonwealth funding under the PIP QI incentive.
PIP QI Upload Solution for non-PHN-Affiliated
The majority of general practices in our region already provide data to us using the preferred and provided GP data extraction technology, and under a data sharing agreement and related software licensing. For these practices, the PIP Eligible Data Set forms part of that existing Data Sharing Agreement and data extraction process.
However, there are practices which are not affiliated with PHNs currently for the purposes of data sharing, non-PHN-Affiliated practices, and who do not use GP Data Extraction software with their Clinical information System (CIS), but who are nonetheless enrolled in the PIP QI program as participating practices.
For these non-PHN-affiliated practices who enter into a formal Data Sharing Agreement (DSA), a means of securely transferring the aggregate PIP QI Eligible Data Set into our custody will be available free of charge from March 2023 via the Nepean Blue Mountains PHN (NBMPHN) Portal for those who want to use it.
Further information can be found on the NBMPHN Portal - Secure File Transfer and Storage Solution page or by sending an email to the Health Data Team.
More information
Our Primary Care Engagement team is available to assist you with any inquiries related to PIPQI. Call them on 4708 8100 or contact them online.
