FAQs

General program

PHASES — Preventing Heart Attack and Stroke Events through Surveillance — is an initiative focused on reducing the burden of cardiovascular disease in Queensland by leveraging Primary Sense a clinical decision support tool that uses general practice data to give patients the right care at the right time. Its core goal is to identify people at the highest risk of heart attacks and strokes early, so that healthcare providers can intervene sooner and manage risk factors more effectively. This proactive approach, aims to improve patient outcomes and contribute to better cardiovascular health across the state.

Primary Sense provides real-time clinical insights from practice data, enabling both opportunistic and systematic patient recalls for practices who use Best Practice (BP) and Medical Director (MD). These insights help guide targeted interventions for managing cardiovascular risk.

If your practice doesn’t have access to Primary Sense (because you don’t use the Best Practice or Medical Director clinical systems), you can still participate in PHASES. Contact your local PHN or the PHASES team phasesqld@c2coast.org.au to explore alternative approaches and express your interest.

NB. For practices using Best Practice or Medical Director who do not have Primary Sense installed, reach out to your local PHN for assistance on installation and training. Primary Sense is fully funded, so General Practices do not incur any out-of-pocket expenses.

Primary Care providers across Queensland, including general practices, allied health professionals, Royal Flying Doctor Service, Aboriginal Medical Services and other Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations. Cardiology Specialists within Queensland who see referred patients at risk are encouraged to participate. Participation is voluntary and supported by the PHN engagement teams.

There are benefits to patients, primary care providers and the broader healthcare system including:

  • Improved patient outcomes through early intervention.
  • Access to cardiovascular risk assessment tools.
  • More targeted treatment by identifying individuals at the highest risk of CVD.
  • Contribution to a statewide initiative for cardiovascular health.

Implementation and support

The PHASES project is funded until the 2028/29 financial year with most engagement activities planned for 2026, as teams help embed new workflows and practices. While the project itself will conclude, the goal is for proactive management of cardiovascular risk factors to become standard practice in primary care, ensuring the benefits of PHASES well beyond the project’s end.

Any of these topic areas will give you a touch point to the PHASES initiative:

Contact your local PHN or mention PHASES the next time the PHN engagement team come to visit, or learn more at phasesqld.com

For general information and support contact your local PHN or contact our PHASES support team at phasesqld@c2coast.org.au

For technical support with Primary Sense, contact your local PHN. For support to access the AusCVD risk calculator, Australian cardiovascular disease risk calculator | AusCVDRisk.

If your PHN offers dashboards and you require assistance in utilising or accessing information, please contact your local PHN.

Training and education

There are a range of resources you can access for more information. Visit the PHASES website for:

  • Factsheets CVD risk factors, Primary Sense and the new CVD Report, MBS billing opportunities, HealthPathways
  • Recordings of the webinar series
  • QI Toolkit

You can also contact your local PHN or the PHASES team phasesqld@c2coast.org.au if you would prefer a more tailored education session.

Data and privacy

Primary Sense data is hosted on Primary Health Insights which is a data storage and analytics platform developed collaboratively by PHNs and hosted in Australia.

The platform provides leading edge data security and robust data governance to minimise the risk of data security breaches and unauthorised data management practices.

Data is de-identified and encrypted when it is extracted before it is forwarded to the database. Extracted de-identified data is stored in the Primary Sense Database, which is located in the cloud-based Microsoft Azure, in Australia.

Future developments

Today! Practices can begin using Primary Sense or their clinical system’s reporting tools to identify and manage patients at risk of CVD. Ongoing support, quality improvement resources and regular updates will be provided to help practices embed proactive cardiovascular care into their routine.

We welcome your input! You can share feedback through:

Other

The allied health sector has a vital role in supporting the lifestyle changes that may be recommended to managed CVD risk. To maximise impact, allied health professionals are encouraged to:

  • Proactively connect with general practices in your local area or with practices that frequently refer clients, to discuss how you can support cardiovascular health and improve outcomes.
  • Offer services that enhance the work of general practice. For example, exercise programs, point-of-care lipid profile analysis, blood pressure. Let practices know you are keen to support them.
  • Participate in statewide referral networks and keep up to date with the PHASES project.

Currently the AusCVDRisk calculator is NOT embedded as an application within clinical systems. However, it is possible to launch a web browser to access the AusCVDRisk calculator Australian cardiovascular disease risk calculator | AusCVDRisk.

Work is underway to enable seamless integration – so that fields can be prepopulated and a risk score automatically fed back into the clinical system. This work is separate from the PHASES project and therefore the exact timing of this integration is not currently available.

Currently the logic used in Primary Sense is the Framingham Risk Calculator which provides a more conservative estimate of cardiovascular risk i.e. it will overestimate risk and so there are no safety concerns that high risk patients will be missed. Work is underway to update the Primary Sense with the AusSCVDRisk tool logic.

Funded by the Queensland Health Clinical Research Fellowship, the PHASES Linkage project connects general practice cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk data with hospitalisation and mortality data. This study aims to better understand how CVD risk impacts hospitalisation rates and assess the accuracy of the new CVD risk prediction equation in identifying high-risk individuals within Queensland’s population. 

The project will: 

  • Estimate the number of heart attacks and strokes that could be prevented with improved treatment for high CVD risk. 
  • Identify gaps in CVD prevention to inform future care strategies. 

Running in parallel with the PHASES project, PHASES Linkage highlights the power of data-driven insights to improve cardiovascular outcomes and reduce hospitalisations.