POLAR stands for Population Level Analysis & Reporting. POLAR software is useful for insight and planning across the areas of clinical, business, quality improvement and accreditation for general practice.
It enables meaningful analysis by general practices of their own identified patient data, which is presented in an easy-to-use graphical format.
SEMPHN provides POLAR software at no cost (100% subsidised) for general practices of all sizes within the SEMPHN catchment.
About POLAR
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Why use POLAR?
POLAR is useful for insight and planning across clinical and business and accreditation for general practices of all sizes.
POLAR allows your general practice to:
- Access and review patient cohorts
- Undertake quality improvement and data cleansing
- Improve planning capabilities including internal service needs and health campaigns and patient education
- Inform patient-centred care and improve patient health outcomes
- Identify “at-risk” patients on a range of clinical indicators
- Replace “out of license” data analysis software
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Does the RACGP support analysing patient data to improve patient care?
Yes. In their advice on using data for better health outcomes the RACGP says “using data to understand population health helps paint a picture of the overall wellbeing of a community. Data can highlight differences in health status between social groups and can help determine what approaches need to be prioritised. With advances in technology, general practices are able to capture and analyse health data more efficiently and without additional costs.”
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Who can use POLAR?
POLAR is suitable for use by all general practice staff, including practice principals, general practitioners, nurses, practice managers, business managers and admin staff.
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How does POLAR work?
POLAR performs a data collection (extracts changed data) from the practice software every five minutes. The de-identified practice data is encrypted using industry endorsed algorithms similar as those used in the health, banking and e-commerce sectors. The encrypted identified data is stored locally with the POLAR software.
The encrypted de-identified data is uploaded directly to the POLAR data warehouse (located in Melbourne). Overnight the accumulated de-identified data is built into POLAR Reports and made available for the viewing by the practice the following morning. When POLAR is opened at the practice the locally stored identified data and the de-identified data drawn from the POLAR Data Warehouse are unencrypted locally and matched enabling reports to be viewed and analysed.
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Who supports POLAR?
Support for POLAR is provided free by the individual Primary Health Networks (PHNs).
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What benefits does POLAR provide SEMPHN?
SEMPHN can use de-identified and aggregated POLAR data to improve population health planning across our SEMPHN catchment. SEMPHN catchment includes the local government areas (LGAs) of Bayside, Cardinia, Casey, Frankston, Glen Eira, Greater Dandenong, Kingston, Mornington Peninsula, Port Philip and Stonnington.
POLAR allows us to:
- Work more closely with and better understand general practice
- Identify community health care needs
- Design better health care services
- Make evidence-based decisions on resource allocations, such as education and training, workshops and seminars, and small grants to incentivise identified service needs
- Feed back to general practices about identified activity and gaps
Data analysis: Ask questions and get answers
Data analysis is all about asking questions and finding answers.
POLAR is as open as possible in its structure, aiming to help you find answers to questions specific to your general practice. POLAR makes your routine data analysis straight forward, simple, and useful.
Example: Ask POLAR, "how many of my regular patients, who have a current diagnosis of diabetes, and have not had a care plan in the last 12 months"?
You can analyse your data to identify gaps in patient care, allocate resources and clinicians accordingly, and build on your clinical strengths including in the areas of quality improvement and safety.
Contact the Provider Support Team at providersupport@semphn.org.au or directly call on 03 8514 4460 to book a demonstration.
Getting set up with POLAR
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Sign up documentation
Below are documents and instructions for participating practices to download, read and complete in order to get set up with POLAR software.
Step 1: Download and read the Data Security and Privacy document. Call us if you have any questions (03 8514 4460).
Step 2: Download, print, complete and scan your choice of option 1 or option 2. Choose whether you would like your de-identified data to be made available for research:
- Data Sharing & Licensing Agreement (option 1 for Research) or
- Data Sharing & Licensing Agreement (option 2 for Non-Research)
Step 3: Download and complete the POLAR Technical Requirements Checklist. This helps us with your POLAR installation. If you need assistance, get in touch with your ICT provider.
Step 4: Attach your completed documents from Step 2 and Step 3 and email polar@semphn.org.au.
Step 5: Download, print and display A3 GP Poster (option 1 for reception area) or A3 GP Poster (option 2 for reception area) in your reception area. If you’d like a printed version, request copies by calling us on 03 8514 4460.
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Accounts & Logins
POLAR access requires your practice users to have an individual user account. After returning the signed POLAR Data Sharing & Licensing Agreement, we create the user accounts.
Your POLAR Administrator can setup and manage your POLAR user accounts for any staff member and allow or restrict access to revenue information in individual reports (polarexplorer.org.au).
For example, under the Clinic Summary report, the practice principal and practice manager can see MBS items and numbers and revenue, while nurses can be restricted to seeing MBS items and numbers only and not MBS revenue.
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A guide to POLAR explorer
View the guide to POLAR explorer.
We provide software support for POLAR issues, updates, advice, requests, remote training, and documentation.
When asked by a member of our team, click the POLAR Remote Support to download the remote support software (TeamViewer).
Walkthroughs and instructions
POLAR Walkthrough documents are short step-by-step guides designed to help you perform common and not so common patient data searches in POLAR (polarexplorer.org.au).
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POLAR quick start & how to guides
- POLAR Quick Start User Guide (Jul21)
- How To - Screen shot any page (Jul21)
- How To - Print a patient list in excel(Jul21)
- How To - Opt a patient out of POLAR (Jul21)
- How To - PIP-QI Report (Sep20)
- How To - Use Filters and Search (Jul21)
- How To - Find Pathology Labs (Jul21)
- How to - Create a bookmark
- How to - Add, remove, change user details in POLAR explorer
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*NEW* Patient Flagging
- How to create a Custom Status for Patient Flagging.
- How to set up Patient Flagging.
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Quality Improvement
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Care plans: new, review and expired
Read the Walkthrough for Care Plans. The document explores how to find:
- patients who are due for a Care Plan review
- patients who are eligible for a Care Plan renewal
- patients who have an expired Care Plan
- patients who have never had a Care Plan.
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Health Assessments, HMRs and Health Heart Check: new and expired
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Eligible or overdue for medication affecting bone density
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Diagnosis: Find patients by diagnosis
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Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander
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Diabetes: Find and manage diabetic patients
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Immunisation: Find patients for immunisation
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Life! Program referral: Find patients for Life! Program
The following POLAR Walkthroughs relate to the Life! Program (lifeprogram.org.au) with a focus on screening patients for diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
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POLAR and your practice software (data mapping)
POLAR has extensive data mapping for its reports, so you can clearly see where POLAR is selecting the data from in your practice software.
For example, go to Clinic Summary report > Diagnosis page > Help menu > select Data mapping for this page, using your POLAR login details opens into Outcome Health's POLAR resources website called Confluence.
In the POLAR Mapping section of Confluence you will select your practice software and then be presented with information for that page including Definitions, Calculation and Logic, Source in clinical system, and screenshots showing where to enter patient data so that it can show up in POLAR.
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How to clear your cache (Google Chrome)
Open Google Chrome:
- Select the ellipsis (3 vertical dots top right hand corner of screen)
- Select Settings
- Click Advanced
- Click Privacy and security
- Click Clear browsing data
- Click Advanced tab and select Time range > All time
- Select 'Browsing history' & 'Download history' & 'Cookies and other site data' & 'Cached images and files' tickboxes > Clear data button
- close and reopen Google Chrome
- visit polarexplorer.org.au
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How to bulk inactivate patients in practice software
How to send a patient SMS broadcast
The POLAR Patient List may be uploaded to your 'online appointment' software for sending of customised broadcast SMS messages to your patients.
You will need to save your Patient List file as a .csv file extension (instead of .xlsx) using Excel (i.e.Patient List.xlsx to Patient List.csv).
The POLAR Patient List includes patient ID and mobile number from your practice software. The patient ID number allows you to customise the message with the patient's name and may automatically respect the patient's SMS opt-out preference.
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Hot Doc instructions
The following instructions will step you through uploading your Patient List.csv file to send patient SMS using Hot Doc:
- In POLAR, under Patient List menu, click 'Export to Excel' button to create your patient.xlsx file
- In Excel, open your file patients.xlsx and save as patients.csv
- Highlight and copy the BOLDED heading (below) according to your clinical software (without spaces): Best Practice = INTERNALID
/ Medical Director = PATIENT_ID / Zedmed = FILE_NUMBER - In Excel, open your patients.csv file, edit Cell A1, delete ID heading and paste the BOLDED heading (e.g. for Medical Director copy and paste PATIENT_ID) - save and close the file. NOTE: DO NOT PASTE THE BOLDED HEADING OVER THE ID HEADING AS THE DATA MAY NOT IMPORT INTO HOT DOC
- Click and follow the Hot Doc: How to upload a CSV file instructions
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HealthEngine instructions
The following instructions will step you through uploading you Patient List.csv file to send patient SMS using HealthEngine:
- In POLAR, under Patient List menu, click 'Export to Excel' button to create your patient.xlsx file
- In Excel, open your file patients.xlsx, delete all the columns except mobile number and save as patients.csv
- Go to HealthEngine and follow the How to upload a CSV file instructions
PDSA - Plan, Do, Study, Act guides
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Age
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Emergency Contact
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Ethnicity
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Gender
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Next of Kin
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic data - Post Code
PDSA Guide - Missing Demographic date - Suburb
PDSA Guide - Missing Clinical data - Social History & Family History
PDSA Guide - Missing Clinical data - Allergies, Allergy Reactions, Smoking, Alcohol, BMI
Quality Improvement (QI)
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What is data quality improvement?
Data quality improvement (QI) means improving the quality of the data displayed in POLAR which is directly related to the quality of the data entered into your practice software.
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How to benchmark and track QI
The best option for benchmarking and tracking your practice's quality improvement over time is to copy (print screen keyboard button, or snipping software) and paste screenshots of your POLAR pages into Microsoft Word documents, and save these to a centralised network folder called POLAR.
The walkthrough for Demographics and Clinical Metrics for Quality Improvement shows you how to manage benchmarking and tracking.
Contact us if you would like assistance with your Quality Improvement benchmarking and tracking and Screenshots to Word.
Practice Incentive Payments (PIP) Quality Improvement (QI)
SEMPHN’s Quality Improvement page has detailed information about the Practice Incentive Payments (PIP) Quality Improvement (QI) incentive requirements.
South Eastern Melbourne PHN
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SEMPHN acknowledges the Bunurong and Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands, waters, and skies in which we work. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present. We also acknowledge all First Nations peoples with whom we work. Sovereignty was never ceded!