For the purposes of evaluating the Health Care Homes (HCH) Trial, Pen CS has enhanced its current CAT Plus suite of products to allow participating practices to enrol and manage patients who have agreed to take part in the HCH Trial. This enhanced functionality is delivered through the Health Care Homes PAT Program.
The Pen CS platform includes four fully integrated products:
- Topbar – decision support tool at point of care
- CAT4 – practice population extraction and reporting tool
- Pen CS Scheduler – automated CAT4 collection and data submission tool
- PAT Programs – Patient enrolment, tracking, filtering and reporting solution
Participating practices will gain access to the HCH App in Topbar. The HCH App will allow the health professional to enrol a patient into one of three tiers according to their care requirements. For practices not using Topbar, a patient enrol solution using CAT4 is available, however Topbar is the recommended tool for patient enrolment.
CAT4 reporting and filtering provides an additional level of detail allowing practices apply their own risk stratification rules to recall patients that may benefit from participating in the trial. Once patients have been enrolled in a HCH tier, CAT4 provides options to filter by those tiers to assist with patient health management throughout the duration of the trial.
Monthly CAT4 data collections can be automated and will collect, de-identify and submit de-identified data to both the PHN and the Health Policy Analysis Pty Ltd for further evaluation.
Please note that Topbar is available for MD3, BP and Zedmed, while CAT4 is compatible to a range of other clinical systems. Any participating clinic or ACCHS will have to decide between Topbar and CAT4 as an enrolment tool prior to commencing the enrolment of patients. We recommend, where possible, to use Topbar at the point of care while the patient is present at the clinic.
Topbar and CAT4 provide different functionality in the context of the HCH trial:
- Topbar is mainly used to enrol patients and has a basic enrolment report showing all enrolled patients at the clinic
- CAT4 can enrol patients if Topbar is not compatible to the clinical system
- CAT4 provides new reports and filters to enable clinics to analyse their data with regards to patients HCH status
We have created a number of quick reference guides to illustrate the functionality of Topbar and CAT4 for HCH:
For Topbar users:
Health Care Homes App User Guide - Topbar
For all HCH trial participants:
Health Care Homes CAT4 Management
For users who will use CAT4 for patient enrolment:
Health Care Homes CAT4 Enrolment
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