What strategic outcomes will be achieved by the ANDA survey?

The activity is run by Monash University and facilitated by the National Association of Diabetes Centres (NADC). The primary aim of ANDA is to provide benchmarking of clinical, self-management and care related outcomes among services providing care for people with diabetes.

The secondary aim is to provide an annual national snapshot of outcomes among people with diabetes across the different segments of the health care system.

Monitoring variation in healthcare is known to support best practice and improve quality of care. Clinical registries are increasingly recognised as credible, effective and feasible tools to measure variation and drive quality improvement at the national and jurisdictional health system levels.

What is different between ANDA-AQSMA and ANDA-AQCA?

The ANDA–AQSMA (Australian Quality Self-Management Audit) is more focused on self-management, diabetes distress and depression and collects data related to diabetes education, self-care practices and quality of life. ANDA-AQCA (Australian Quality Clinical Audit) is run every alternate year to ANDA-AQSMA. This audit focuses on clinical indicators known to reflect the care and outcomes of people with diabetes.

To view the pooled reports, click here.

How is ANDA funded?

ANDA is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health.

The coordination of ANDA is overseen by Professor Sophia Zoungas (at Monash University) in collaboration with the NADC.

Who can participate in ANDA?

Any health care services providing care to people with diabetes can participate.

The Australian Government Department of Health is keen to see increased participation from primary care and other community based services.

ANDA may be undertaken or facilitated by Primary Health Networks (PHN), Primary Care Physicians (PCP), Health care networks or individual practices.

How can we become involved in ANDA?

If your organisation is interested in participating in ANDA, please contact the ANDA secretariat at anda@nadc.net.au for further information.

When will we need to complete the survey?

Distribution of survey forms will occur in February/March. Data collection can commence in May or June for a period of 4 consecutive weeks. For smaller centres to be able to increase the number of patients they collect data on, can carry out their data collection in May and June (8 consecutive weeks).

What is the strategic benefit to any GP practices or primary care centres in getting involved?

Benchmarking and audit feedback provide opportunities for comparisons with peers and across the different elements of the health care system as well as identifying key areas for quality improvement among diabetes services.

ANDA is unique in that it allows this to happen across all levels of the health care system, is funded and endorsed by the Australian Government Department of Health and includes collection of a minimal dataset consistent with international standards around health care indicators for diabetes.

What about privacy issues?

ANDA is an audit activity where coded data is only collected and this is provided to the ANDA operational centre at Monash University by electronic secure file transfer protocol methods or as coded paper forms that are scanned to a secure database.

Practices are allocated a site number (this remains confidential and is managed by the ANDA secretariat) so that participating sites are not identifiable in any pooled or individual site reports.

Any queries related to data are addressed directly by the practice/sites to maintain this level of security (i.e. around no release/acceptance of identifiable information).

ANDA-L is a longitudinal activity which is a sub study of ANDA that deals with identifiable information for the purposes of following up patients over a period of 2 and 4 years. This information will also assist in performing anticipated data linkage to external databases. All identifiable information submitted by each site for ANDA-L is uploaded through a secure file transfer process (SFTP) with a designated specific site username and password.

Who has access to the data and if we are collecting practice patient data, have you sought ethics approval where necessary?

Data is housed at Monash University at the ANDA operational centre in a secure data zone. Sites can be provided with an extract of their own data for their own use on request.

Data sharing arrangements have been approved by the Monash Health Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners National Research and Evaluation Ethics Committee (NREEC).

Participating sites or external researchers may request a completely coded pooled dataset for research purposes. These requests are reviewed by an advisory committee. Please refer to the ANDA Data Access and Publication Policy.

Sites can also indicate if they do not want their data to be included in future research.

Do you have a form for practices to address any patient privacy/practice privacy issues?

To date this has not been required because the data collection has been for quality improvement purposes only. As such each site has been encouraged to seek local advice on ethical requirements/approvals.

Are these documents available to share with organisations before they respond?

Yes, they are provided to all sites after they express interest in participating.

Do you have information on when and how the data collection is processed?

Yes, this information is provided in the protocol and sent to each organisation.

In summary, organisations/practices can opt from one of 3 formats in collecting data:

• Scannable paper-based form which is designed to be scanned and the data from these forms transferred to a password protected database with restricted access.
• Web-based data collection form where data is entered directly into a secure web-based interface, stored on a secure Monash University server. All sites are encouraged to opt for this format.
• Electronic Data Extraction where data is extracted directly from the organisation/practice in-house databases and transferred via a secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) to the Monash server.

Can I see previous ANDA reports?

Yes you can access the pooled ANDA reports, click here.

Where can I find more information?

More information can be found at the NADC website.