The COVID-19 pandemic in The Netherlands; importance of registration networks and ICPC in Primary Care

Last edited 14 September Reliable data about the corona crisis (COVID-19) in Dutch general practice has been scarce from the beginning. Since March 2th, the Fame-Net (Radboud University Medical Centre Family Medicine Network) has carefully registered all care contacts...
Read More

Improving the quality of family medicine

FaMe-net (a merger of the Transition Project and Continuous Morbidity Registration Nijmegen) aims to formally characterize and describe the domain of international family practice based on episode oriented epidemiology, using ICPC as its ordering principle, and ICD-10 as its nomenclature.

Mission

The foundation aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to education and research to improve the quality of general practice care by registering systematically and uniformly all presented morbidity, according to information from direct and indirect patient contacts.

There is a specific focus on the evolution of morbidity, the influence of the medical act in this morbidity, and the context of the individual patient.

Data

The set of data is achieved by making use of the ICPC (International Classification of Primary Care) as the organizing principle and the ICD as the nomenclature in episode-based epidemiology.

TransHis

TransHis is an Electronic Patient Record for use in primary care. TransHis was specially developed for the Transition Project.

Focus

The project focuses on the following areas:

  • collection / analysis of comprehensive, longitudinal, episode based data from primary care;
  • development of the rules governing the comparison of international family medicine data;
  • development of a reliable and feasible ICPC ICD-10 conversion, and the development and implementation of an alphabetic ICPC ICD-10 thesaurus (in several languages) for use in electronic patient records (EPR) in family medicine;
  • development and refinement of a state of the art EPR, leaving the detailed coding of morbidity and health care, and facilitating transmural communication specialists;
  • development of conversions between ICPC and other classifications, nomenclatures and glossaries that are relevant to general practice, such Snomed CT;
  • analysis and standardization of prescribing in general practice;
  • the development of a basic set of indicators, determinants encoded with the ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health)

Method

The foundation seeks to achieve its goal, including by:

  • Providing information and intelligence to participating physicians, patients, researchers and other interested parties about purpose and procedures of the foundation;
  • Advising on the use of patient-related data;
  • Advising on the use of the foundation made available data and information;
  • The potential to attract researchers in order using the foundation collected files additionally, to do retrospective or prospective studies;
  • To provide Transhis as a tool for the development of a registration network.

Project leader

Former project leaders

  • Prof. Dr. H. Lamberts (from 1984 till 2005, † 27 december 2008).
  • Dr. I.M. Okkes (from 1992 till 2005).

Participants

See our list of participants.