Future Health Today
Future Health Today is a clinical decision support tool designed by primary care for primary care. It covers a range of presentations encountered in general practice to optimise patient care.
A GP must have a good working knowledge of 167 problems to cover 85% of the conditions they will see most frequently.
Cooke G, Valenti L, Glasziou P, Britt H. Common general practice presentations and publication frequency. Australian Family Physician 2013; 42 (1-2): 65-68
Clinical decision support for primary care
Two million Australians visit a general practice each week. This provides an ideal opportunity for prevention and early intervention across a range of patient presentations.
In a time of accelerating evidence generation and proliferation of guidelines, Future Health Today provides primary care practitioners with easy access to the latest recommendations to support their clinical decision making.
Individualised patient recommendations
Future Health Today uses sophisticated algorithms to review patient records in general practice and automate the identification of patients who require further testing, diagnosis or management.
Recommendations are displayed in a point of care tool during the patient consultation and in a portal for proactive patient management and tracking over time.
Patient is AT RISK of developing a medical condition
Patient has medical condition but NO RECORDED DIAGNOSIS
Patient diagnosed but management REVIEW MAY BE REQUIRED
Resources for decision making
The point of care tool provides diagnosis and management recommendations and facilitates shared decision making between doctor and patient with clinical guidelines and consumer resources linked to the recommendations.
Patient cohort management, tracking, recall lists and educational opportunities are all available via the portal.
Translating clinical guidelines into clinical outcomes
Future Health Today supports primary care to provide individualised, guideline concordant care to patients.
General practices in the Future Health Today network are at the forefront of real-world implementation research, piloting and optimising disease recommendation modules.
If your general practice would like to join the Future Health Today network, or if you are involved in a research project and would like to discuss a new recommendation module, please get in touch with the team.
More information
Meet the co-leads of Future Health Today
Papers and presentations
Optimisation of a Quality Improvement Tool for Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care: Qualitative Study
(Published in JMIR Formative Research)
Future Health Today: codesign of an electronic chronic disease quality improvement tool for use in general practice using a service design approach
(Published in BMJ Open)
Future Health Today: Exploring barriers and facilitators to implementation of a new technology platform for quality improvement in general practice
(Delivered at the AAAPC 2020 conference)
Data Driven Quality Improvement in General Practice
General practice research: an investment to improve the health of all Australians
(Published in Medical Journal of Australia)
Co-designing technology to improve Chronic Kidney Disease in general practice
(Poster presented at the 8th Annual NHMRC Symposium on Research Translation)
(Published in Health Informatics Journal)
The development of Future Health Today: piloting a new platform for identification and management of chronic disease in general practice. (Published in Australian Journal of Primary Health)
Data security statement
Future Health Today operates in accordance with relevant privacy and health records legislation and has been granted the necessary ethics approvals by The University of Melbourne. Consent and legal agreement are received from the participating general practices before implementation on site. Data within practice electronic medical records known to normally contain personally-identifiable information will not be extracted from general practices.
For further information about data governance, please contact the Future Health Today team.
Educational resources
Past Project ECHO® didactic presentations available to view:
Diabetes
SGLT2i for type 2 diabetes management in patients diagnosed with CKD
SGLT2i for type 2 diabetes management in people at risk of, or diagnosed with, CVD
SGLT2i for hyperglycaemia management in patients with type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes – rational use of pharmacotherapy
Type 2 diabetes – monitoring and technology
Cardiovascular disease
CVD – pharmacological management
CVD – risk and primary prevention
Matters of the heart: identifying and managing cardiovascular disease risk
Chronic kidney disease
The Kidney Health Check: who needs one and how often should they be done?
Cardiovascular risk assessment in chronic kidney disease
Controversies in CVD management in people with CKD
Cancer
Could my patient with anaemia have cancer?
Abnormal test results and cancer risk: Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA)
Abnormal test results and cancer risk: Thrombocytosis
Quality improvement
QI activity measurement and reporting
Elements of quality improvement including small group clinical audit activities
Frameworks for developing and implementing QI
Key elements of quality improvement and the roles and responsibilities to make it work
Future Health Today is a collaboration between The University of Melbourne and Western Health.
We acknowledge the generous support of our funders – Paul Ramsay Foundation, Melbourne Academic Centre for Health, Cancer Research UK, MTPConnect.
Email: contact-fht@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: 03 8344 1371
Department of General Practice and Primary Care
The University of Melbourne
Level 3, 780 Elizabeth Street Parkville, Victoria 3052 Australia
© Future Health Today 2023