Improving Primary Health Care Data With ICPC-3: From a Medical to a Person-Centered Perspective.

The World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) developed the third edition of the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-3) to support the shift from a medical perspective to a person-centered perspective in primary health care. The previous editions (ICPC-1 and ICPC-2) allowed description of 3 important elements of health care encounters: the reason for the encounter, the diagnosis and/or health problem, and the process of care. The ICPC-3 adds function-related information as a fourth element, thereby capturing most parts of the encounter in a single practical and concise classification. ICPC-3 thus has the potential to give more insight on patients' activities and functioning, supporting physicians in shifting from a strict medical/disease-based approach to care to a more person-centered approach. The ICPC-3 is also expanded with a new chapter for visits pertaining to immunizations and for coding of special screening examinations and public health promotion; in addition, it contains classes for programs related to reported conditions (eg, a cardiovascular program, a heart failure program) and can accommodate relevant national or regional classes. Classes are selected based on what is truly and frequently occurring in daily practice. Each class has its own codes. Less frequently used concepts pertaining to morbidity are captured as inclusions within the main classes. Implementation of the ICPC-3 in an electronic health record allows provision of meaningful feedback to primary care, and supports the exchange of information within teams and between primary and secondary care. It also gives policy makers and funders insight into what is happening in primary care and thus has the potential to improve provision of care.

Unburdening dementia - a basic social process grounded theory based on a primary care physician survey from 25 countries.

OBJECTIVE: To explore dementia management from a primary care physician perspective. DESIGN: One-page seven-item multiple choice questionnaire; free text space for every item; final narrative question of a dementia case story. Inductive explorative grounded theory analysis. Derived results in cluster analyses. Appropriateness of dementia drugs assessed by tertiary care specialist. SETTING: Twenty-five European General Practice Research Network member countries. SUBJECTS: Four hundred and forty-five key informant primary care physician respondents of which 106 presented 155 case stories. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Processes and typologies of dementia management. Proportion of case stories with drug treatment and treatment according to guidelines. RESULTS: Unburdening dementia - a basic social process - explained physicians' dementia management according to a grounded theory analysis using both qualitative and quantitative data. Unburdening starts with Recognizing the dementia burden by Burden Identification and Burden Assessment followed by Burden Relief. Drugs to relieve the dementia burden were reported for 130 of 155 patients; acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or memantine treatment in 89 of 155 patients - 60% appropriate according to guidelines and 40% outside of guidelines. More Central and Northern primary care physicians were allowed to prescribe, and more were engaged in dementia management than Eastern and Mediterranean physicians according to cluster analyses. Physicians typically identified and assessed the dementia burden and then tried to relieve it, commonly by drug prescriptions, but also by community health and home help services, mentioned in more than half of the case stories. CONCLUSIONS: Primary care physician dementia management was explained by an Unburdening process with the goal to relieve the dementia burden, mainly by drugs often prescribed outside of guideline indications. Implications: Unique data about dementia management by European primary care physicians to inform appropriate stakeholders. Key points Dementia as a syndrome of cognitive and functional decline and behavioural and psychological symptoms causes a tremendous burden on patients, their families, and society. •We found that a basic social process of Unburdening dementia explained dementia management according to case stories and survey comments from primary care physicians in 25 countries. •First, Burden Recognition by Identification and Assessment and then Burden Relief - often by drugs. •Prescribing physicians repeatedly broadened guideline indications for dementia drugs. The more physicians were allowed to prescribe dementia drugs, the more they were responsible for the dementia work-up. Our study provides unique data about dementia management in European primary care for the benefit of national and international stakeholders.

Exploring dementia management attitudes in primary care: a key informant survey to primary care physicians in 25 European countries.

BACKGROUND: Strategies for the involvement of primary care in the management of patients with presumed or diagnosed dementia are heterogeneous across Europe. We wanted to explore attitudes of primary care physicians (PCPs) when managing dementia: (i) the most popular cognitive tests, (ii) who had the right to initiate or continue cholinesterase inhibitor or memantine treatment, and (iii) the relationship between the permissiveness of these rules/guidelines and PCP's approach in the dementia investigations and assessment. METHODS: Key informant survey. SETTING: Primary care practices across 25 European countries. SUBJECTS: Four hundred forty-five PCPs responded to a self-administered questionnaire. Two-step cluster analysis was performed using characteristics of the informants and the responses to the survey. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Two by two contingency tables with odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were used to assess the association between categorical variables. A multinomial logistic regression model was used to assess the association of multiple variables (age class, gender, and perceived prescription rules) with the PCPs' attitude of "trying to establish a diagnosis of dementia on their own." RESULTS: Discrepancies between rules/guidelines and attitudes to dementia management was found in many countries. There was a strong association between the authorization to prescribe dementia drugs and pursuing dementia diagnostic work-up (odds ratio, 3.45; 95% CI 2.28-5.23). CONCLUSIONS: Differing regulations about who does what in dementia management seemed to affect PCP's engagement in dementia investigations and assessment. PCPs who were allowed to prescribe dementia drugs also claimed higher engagement in dementia work-up than PCPs who were not allowed to prescribe.

The search for person-related information in general practice: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: General practice is person-focused. Contextual information influences the clinical decision-making process in primary care. Currently, person-related information (PeRI) is neither recorded in a systematic way nor coded in the electronic medical record (EMR), and therefore not usable for scientific use. AIM: To search for classes of PeRI influencing the process of care. METHODS: GPs, from nine countries worldwide, were asked to write down narrative case histories where personal factors played a role in decision-making. In an inductive process, the case histories were consecutively coded according to classes of PeRI. The classes found were deductively applied to the following cases and refined, until saturation was reached. Then, the classes were grouped into code-families and further clustered into domains. RESULTS: The inductive analysis of 32 case histories resulted in 33 defined PeRI codes, classifying all personal-related information in the cases. The 33 codes were grouped in the following seven mutually exclusive code-families: 'aspects between patient and formal care provider', 'social environment and family', 'functioning/behaviour', 'life history/non-medical experiences', 'personal medical information', 'socio-demographics' and 'work-/employment-related information'. The code-families were clustered into four domains: 'social environment and extended family', 'medicine', 'individual' and 'work and employment'. CONCLUSION: As PeRI is used in the process of decision-making, it should be part of the EMR. The PeRI classes we identified might form the basis of a new contextual classification mainly for research purposes. This might help to create evidence of the person-centredness of general practice.

Psychosocial factors associated with health-related quality of life in patients with chronic disease: Results of a cross-sectional survey.

OBJECTIVE: The impact of various psychosocial factors (sense of coherence, illness perception, patient enablement, self-efficacy, health literacy, personality) is not fully understood across a wide range of chronic diseases, and in particular in patients with multimorbidity. As such, this study assessed the key psychosocial factors associated with impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with one or more chronic diseases based on cross-sectional data collected in Flanders (Belgium). METHODS: Cross-sectional data on 544 chronically ill patients were analysed. Multiple linear regression models were built to analyze the key psychosocial factors associated with HRQoL (EQ-5D-5Lindex as dependent factor). RESULTS: Overall, the strongest independently associated factor with HRQoL was illness perceptions (ß = -0.52, P < 0.001). In addition, sense of coherence (ß = 0.14, P = < 0.05) was independently positively associated with HRQoL. Moreover, after stratification for multimorbidity, the negative association of illness perceptions with HRQoL was stronger when multimorbidity is present compared to when it is absent (ß = -0.62, P < 0.001 vs ß = -0.38, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed interesting associations of the modifiable psychosocial factors of illness perceptions and sense of coherence with HRQoL in a population of chronically ill persons. Given that the burden of chronic diseases will rise in the next decades, designing and implementing interventions that enhance these psychosocial abilities of patients, especially illness perceptions in multimorbid patients, is needed in order to reduce the burden of chronic diseases in terms of impaired HRQoL.

Burden of COVID-19 on primary care in Belgium: a prospective nationwide observational study from March to August 2020.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 outbreak had an important impact on general practice, for example the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the switch to telephone consultations. We installed a monitoring instrument and reported the burden the COVID-19 pandemic placed on Belgian general practitioners (GPs) during the first wave of the pandemic. METHODS: We conducted an observational longitudinal prospective study from the 19th of March until the 17th of August 2020. Daily data were collected by using a structured electronic form integrated into the GPs' electronic medical records (EMRs). Data were collected on the GPs' need for support and workload, epidemiological indicators and the availability of PPE. Reports with graphical presentations were made for GP circles and primary care zones, and governments of different administrative levels had access to all data to guide their policy. RESULTS: A total of 3.769 different GP centres participated, which included more than 10.000 GPs. Throughout the first three weeks, 20% declared they had insufficient resources (personnel and material) for the following week. Approximately 10% continued to report this during the entire study. The majority reported being able to complete their daily tasks without loss of quality. During the first week, 30% indicated an increased workload. Afterwards, this number decreased and stabilized to an average of 10-20%. More than 70% of the consultations in March 2020 were conducted by telephone. This percentage declined in April and stabilized at approximately 30% in June 2020. Consultations due to respiratory symptoms peaked at 4000/100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the outbreak, then decreased over time along with the COVID-19 incidence. We noticed a lack of disinfectant hand gel, surgical masks and FFP2 masks, the latter remaining problematic in the long term. CONCLUSION: We introduced an instrument in Belgian EMR systems to monitor the burden on GPs during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lack of PPE and increased workload were considered to be the main obstacles. A large number of the GP offices switched to teleconsultations to provide healthcare. Our monitoring instrument provided information for policy makers to intervene on a local level.

Health-related quality of life in patients with non-communicable disease: study protocol of a cross-sectional survey.

INTRODUCTION: Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are associated with lower health-related quality of life (HRQoL). However, knowledge about those diseases and predictors with a greater impact on patients' HRQoL as well as knowledge on the complex relationship between HRQoL and comorbidities is lacking. The aim of this study is to assess the impact of NCDs on patients' HRQoL, with a focus on multimorbidity and socioeconomic status. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: A primary care-based cross-sectional study is conducted in Flanders (Belgium). Study participants (≥18 years) are medically diagnosed with at least one of the following diseases: cardiometabolic disorders, mental disorders and musculoskeletal disorders. A minimum of 50 general practitioners will participate to recruit participants (convenient sample) and a total of 531 patients will be enrolled (voluntary response sample). Each participant will complete a paper-based questionnaire to gather research outcomes. Statistical analyses will be performed using multiple linear regression models with HRQoL as main outcome parameter, adjusted for possible confounders. This study will generate new evidence on the key predictors of HRQoL in patients with NCDs, and particularly provide new insights in multimorbidity to improve the quality of care in primary care, to support patients' self-management and to allocate resources more effectively. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study has been approved by the Ethical Committee of Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium (reference number: B670201939629) prior to the beginning of the recruitment. Study results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.

Is it possible to register the ideas, concerns and expectations behind the reason for encounter as a means of classifying patient preferences with ICPC-2?

BACKGROUND: Family practice aims to recognize the health problems and needs expressed by the person rather than only focusing on the disease. Documenting person-related information will facilitate both the understanding and delivery of person-focused care. Aim To explore if the patients' ideas, concerns and expectations (ICE) behind the reason for encounter (RFE) can be coded with the International Classification of Primary Care, version 2 (ICPC-2) and what kinds of codes are missing to be able to do so. METHODS: In total, 613 consultations were observed, and patients' expressions of ICE were narratively recorded. These descriptions were consequently translated to ICPC codes by two researchers. Descriptions that could not be translated were qualitatively analysed in order to identify gaps in ICPC-2. RESULTS: In all, 613 consultations yielded 672 ICE expressions. Within the 123 that could not be coded with ICPC-2, eight categories could be defined: concern about the duration/time frame; concern about the evolution/severity; concern of being contagious or a danger to others; patient has no concern, but others do; expects a confirmation of something; expects a solution for the symptoms without specification of what it should be; expects a specific procedure; and expects that something is not done. Discussion Although many ICE can be registered with ICPC-2, adding eight new categories would capture almost all ICE.

The International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2): an essential tool in the EPR of the GP.

The International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC) has become a standard all over the world. It became a standard tool to classify the important elements in the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) of the GP: reasons for encounter (RFE) reflecting the patient's view, process of care (decision, action, intervention or plans) reflecting the care process, and the assessment (diagnosis or health issue) reflecting the doctor's view. ICPC-2 is fully compatible with structuring data in the episode of care model and it's reflecting the essential elements of each patient/provider encounter. To implement ICPC-2 in the EPR a Thesaurus has been developed in Belgium with double encoded clinical labels. The implementation is now mandatory for labeled EPR systems in Belgium. The use of ICPC 2 ay improve the accessibility and use of on-line Expert systems and Guidelines.