CAT4 (formerly known as the Clinical Audit Tool) is used extensively as a practice population health reporting tool in General Practice. It gives practices the ability to perform reporting and re-identification of patients within the practice. In addition, it is also able to provide reporting outside the practice using de-identified patient data. An example of the use of reporting outside the practice is to ACCHOs/PHNs, who use CAT4 de-identified data for population health analysis and reporting throughout their local regions. De-identified data refers to patient clinical data (e.g. diagnosis, measurements, pathology etc.) that does not contain information that can be used to identify the patient. De-identified data is permissible for use where it is not practicable to obtain informed consent for use of data. PEN CS has provided tools within CAT4 that can be run by the practice to create a de-identified patient data set. These tools are collectively known as FAT CAT, the Filtering and Anonymisation Tool for CAT. They are incorporated into CAT4. FAT CAT ensures that the de-identified data extract produced by CAT4 strictly adheres to the National Privacy Principles
Pen CS Privacy Policy for CAT4
The Filtering process removes any patients who have withdrawn their consent to share data from the de-identified dataset. These patients can be flagged within CAT4.
Patient Consent for data sharing
The anonymisation process de-identifies the data. All patient information that is identifiable or partially identifiable is removed from the de-identified extract (e.g. name, address, postcode, date of birth, medicare number etc.). Only the patient age in years, ethnicity and gender remains in the extract.
CAT4 de-identified data files that have been through the FAT CAT process are tagged as “certified”. PAT CAT (the PEN Practice Aggregation Tool for CAT) recognises FAT CAT “certified” data files and these are the only data files that PAT CAT will import and display and it will reject any files that are not FAT CAT "certified".