Description:

The General Medical Subsidies Collection contains data on the fee-for-service payments made to doctors for patient visits. It is used to monitor contracts with providers, to support the forecasting and setting of budgets and to enable the analysis of health needs. Originally, almost all patient visits to general practitioners would have resulted in a fee-for-service GMS claim. However since 2003, capitation payments made via Primary Health Organisations (PHOs) have progressively replaced fee-for-service claiming. Now GMS claims are made of only a limited number of patient visits of specific types.

Additional information:

Have_(encrypted)_NHI Yes
Personally identifiable (e.g. linked to NHI numbers) and longitudinal or aggregated (e.g. for planning, clinical research etc.)? encrypted NHI
Volume of data (e.g. how many records) Since when? data from November 2001
Purpose and governance including ethics committee/patient consent mechanisms. Q: How do you get around ethics/privacy issues with your data sources? Esp. DHBs? The GMS Datamart is accessed by authorised National Collections and Reporting staff for maintenance, data quality, audit and analytical purposes. Authorised members of the Ministry of Health and DHBs have access to the data for analytical purposes, via the Business Objects reporting tool and the secure Health Information Network (HIN).
Scope National
Does the data contain diagnoses and clinical outcomes? Does the data contain procedures, device information and medication for therapy? Does this data set have cost / price data? No dx, no outcome, has $
Presence of Data dictionary? Column headings in Excel or any kind of data model if residing in a relational database (e.g. Access, SQL Server, Oracle etc.) http://www.health.govt.nz/publication/general-medical-subsidy-data-mart-data-dictionary
How often does this data set get updated? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? Yearly? The GMS Datamart receives monthly extracts from Sector Services via the IDS.
Brief info about the systems and processes used to collect/manage data. Q: Where the data is collected, in what form, and accessibility? All transactional data is sourced from Sector Services Proclaim system. It is loaded into the GMS Datamart via an intermediate data store (the IDS).
Data format, e.g., data structure, data types, and storage form (relational database, Excel, csv, etc.). structured - can produce extracts in Excel format
How well the data is structured, e.g. free text VS coded text VS pick-list (drop-down list) coded
How quickly can the data be made available from time of request and how old is the data once it is made available Information available to the general public is of a statistical and non-identifiable nature. Researchers requiring identifiable data will usually need approval from an Ethics Committee. Customised datasets or summary reports are available on request, either electronically or on paper. Staff from the Analytical Services team can help to define the specifications for a request and are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the data.