Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Sep 25;18(1):735.
doi: 10.1186/s12913-018-3528-5.

Routine primary care data for scientific research, quality of care programs and educational purposes: the Julius General Practitioners' Network (JGPN)

Hugo M Smeets  1 , Marlous F Kortekaas  2 , Frans H Rutten  1   3 , Michiel L Bots  1 , Willem van der Kraan  4 , Gerard Daggelders  5 , Hanneke Smits-Pelser  6 , Charles W Helsper  1 , Arno W Hoes  1 , Niek J de Wit  1   6
Affiliations

Routine primary care data for scientific research, quality of care programs and educational purposes: the Julius General Practitioners' Network (JGPN)

Hugo M Smeets et al. BMC Health Serv Res. .

Abstract

Background: General Practitioners (GPs) in the Netherlands routinely register all patient contacts electronically. These records include longitudinally gathered clinical information of the patient contacts in coded data and free text.

Methods: Diagnoses are coded according to the International Coding of Primary Care (ICPC). Drug prescriptions are labelled with the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification (ATC), and letters of hospital specialists and paramedic health care professionals are linked or directly incorporated in the electronic medical files. A network of a large group of GPs collecting routine care data on an ongoing basis can be used for answering various research questions.

Results: The Julius General Practitioners' Network (JGPN) database consists of routine care data from over ten years of a dynamic cohort of around 370,000 individuals registered with the participating GPs from the city of Utrecht and its vicinity. Health care data are extracted anonymously every quartile of a year and these data are used by researchers.

Conclusion: We describe the content and usability of our JGPN database, and how a wide variety of research questions could be answered, as illustrated with examples of published articles.

Keywords: Database; Electronic medical record; ICPC; Quality of care; Research.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Authors’ information

All authors work at the Julius Centre or work as a GP and have been involved in the JGPN for quite some years.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Research in the Julius General Practitioners’ Network is observational, without an intervention, and enlisted patients are not individually approached for participation. Therefore, the Medical Ethics Committees in the Netherlands do not rank such research as subject to the Dutch ‘Wet medisch-wetenschappelijk onderzoek’ (WMO; Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act), but researchers need to conform to privacy legislation. The complete pseudomised dataset is stored safely, and only copies of parts of it are delivered to researchers after they have requested it and the Julius General Practitioners’ Network has agreed on executing their research proposal. Such data sets are made only available under the strict condition of anonymity, and researchers have to give written consent to destroy the data at the end of their study. In the data linkage process privacy is ensured by the so-called pseudonymisation procedure; linkage codes are destroyed after successful data linkage.

Consent for publication

Not Applicable

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Anderson JE. Reliability of morbidity data in family practice. J Fam Pract. 1980;10:677–683. - PubMed
    1. Coulter A, Brown S, Daniels A. Computer held chronic disease registers in general practice: a validation study. J Epidemiol Community Health. 1989;43(1):25–28. doi: 10.1136/jech.43.1.25. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Huygen FJA. Family medicine; the medical life history of families. Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt; 1978.
    1. Morris L, Taylor M, Campbell LM, Sullivan FM. How will practices cope with information for the new GMS contract? Coronary heart disease data recording in five Scottish practices. Inform Prim Care. 2003;11(3):121–127. - PubMed
    1. De Jongh H, Kole H, JFM M, Peerden J, Smit C, Stroucken J, et al. Richtlijn adequate dossiervorming met het Elektronisch Medisch Dossier. NHG-publicatie automatisering. Utrecht: Nederlands Huisartsen Genootschap; 2004.

LinkOut - more resources