The Julius General Practitioners Network (JHN) is an intensive collaboration between the Department of Family Medicine of the Julius Center of the UMC Utrecht and general practitioner practices in the Utrecht region. It is a network of about seventy general practices with two hundred general practitioners and over 450,000 patients in the Utrecht area. By contributing to scientific research and innovation, JHN helps to improve the quality of GP care for now and in the future and to respond to developments in healthcare. The Department of Family Medicine at UMC Utrecht manages the JHN on behalf of the participating general practitioners. The JHN is run and maintained by the JHN team consisting of a GP coordinator, data manager, project manager, GP researcher, and secretary.
The JHN-database collects the recorded data from the electronic medical records of member GP practices. It involves coded data such as symptoms and diagnoses (ICPC-codes), medications (ATC-codes), test results (e.g., laboratory and blood pressure), and text that health care providers record in the medical record; the so-called open text fields, or SOEP data.
Intercity
JHN has a close cooperation with GP networks from Amsterdam, Groningen and Maastricht, called Intercity. This cooperation increases efficiency and strength. The processing of data and procedures are aligned, making it easy to analyze data from these networks together. This ensures that large studies are possible.
What happens with the data?
This data is automatically read from the HIS 4 times a year. An intermediary (Proigia/Calculus) makes sure that all data by which an individual patient can be recognized are erased. Each patient receives a new code (pseudonym) with which data can be linked without researchers knowing the exact patient. This pseudonymization process is performed by healthcare TTP.
Through Proigia/Calculus and Zorg TTP, the data enters the JHN database. All data is stored and managed according to the applicable rules and privacy laws.
Figuur 1. Overzicht van betrokken partijen en overeenkomsten bij JHN.
Researchers or parties wishing to analyze data from the JHN network, or conduct research in general practice, should submit an application to the JHN steering committee. This steering committee consists of GPs from the Utrecht GP cooperatives, the JHN team, and researchers from the Julius Center of the UMC Utrecht. The general practitioner representatives from the health care umbrella organizations sit on the JHN Steering Committee in a personal capacity, not as the governing body of the health care umbrella organization.
The JHN Steering Committee assesses in terms of content whether an application is relevant to general practice, whether the research question can be answered with the data, whether the research is feasible in practice, whether the research is methodologically sound, whether applicable laws and regulations have been met, and whether sufficient general practice expertise is involved in the research. After a positive review, the data can be shared with the researcher, or there is a "green light" for researchers to approach family medicine practices in the network to participate in research.
