How we are helping you find eligible patients for Phase 1b

Whether you’re administering 50, 100 or 400 COVID-19 vaccines a week it is crucial to find which of your patients may be eligible for Phase 1b. We’re quickly developing new features to help you find the right patients to vaccinate at the right time.   

At Cubiko we’re developing features to flag patients based on clinical indicators for phase 1b.  

Please note that the intent of this article is to provide insights into new features currently being developed for Cubiko to help practices in regards to potential patient eligibility. We make references to government materials and sources of information. This article is not to be used as a sole source of information regarding vaccination eligibility and please do refer to the appropriate government materials where mentioned.  

 

Eligibility types for phase 1b

Phase 1b of the national COVID-19 vaccine roll-out includes over 6 million patients and over 14 million doses. 

Patients eligible in Phase 1b include: 

  • Elderly adults aged 80 years and over  
  • Elderly adults aged 70 – 79 
  • Other healthcare workers 
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 55 years and over 
  • Young adults with an underlying medical condition, including those with a disability 
  • Critical and high-risk workers including defence, police, fire emergency services and meat processing. 

Cubiko is well known for our Item Optimisation metrics that provide potential patient eligibility of specific item numbers. Customers use these metrics to help deliver outstanding patient care and increase billings. 

Our newest cabinet, Vaccination Support, will provide practices with an easy way to identify their existing patients that may be eligible for the vaccines.  As always it will be up to your clinical team to make the decision and our metrics are a guide only. 

Practices can utilise this metric to:

  • Quickly and easily see how many patients will be eligible and at what stages. 
  • Create a communication plan to engage with your patients you need to communicate to and when. 
  • See potential patient eligibility for the vaccine. Identify patients you already see to look at booking their vaccine appointment proactively.  

Our upcoming new features are to help you ensure that every patient who may be eligible is vaccinated at the right time. 

Potential patient eligibility based on age

Cubiko provides potential patient eligibility based on their age. Our talented team have been able to provide this metric without actually extracting the Date of Birth from your system. Why do we do this? It ensures the highest security of patient identifying data. Cubiko reads the date of birth on-premise on your system and uses this to determine the age. 

Using this age, Cubiko provides metrics for service date and potential patient eligibility. 

Potential patient eligibility for health care workers

With the roll-out of phase 1a, at-risk health care workers have received the first vaccinations. With Phase 1b and onwards, the remaining health care workforce will be vaccinated.

It’s difficult to know all of the active patients and those in the community who may be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. This is where data and entering useful values into your patients’ details in your practice management system is critical.

For our Best Practice customers, Cubiko will read the ‘Occupation’ field in the patient details for all patients who may be eligible for key values indicating they may be a health care worker.

Using this list of patients your practice will be well equipped to know how many patients it will need to vaccinate for phase 1b. Ensure to check for proof of eligibility as per page 12 of your onboarding pack for Phase 1b. Here it indicates Proof of occupation (ID card, letter from employer) or Phase 1b Declaration Form is indicative of Health care workers that were not included in Phase 1a. 

Want to learn more about our Vaccination Support features?

Potential patient eligibility from underlying conditions

With the COVID-19 vaccination for phase 1b, the roll-out includes patients over 18 years with an underlying medical condition, including those with a disability.  Cubiko presents potential patient eligibility to practices based on clinical indicators: for a comprehensive list of which clinical indicators Cubiko is calculating, continue reading! 

Clinical indicators calculated and secured on your server

Cubiko presents practices with certain clinical indicators for potential patient eligibility from underlying conditions. We do this on-premises, on your secure servers at the practice, without the need to bring clinical data into the cloud.

How, you may ask? With our advanced data models, we’re processing clinical indicators for your patients at the server level without placing unnecessary strain on your server. This is completed outside of business hours, not affecting the performance of your practice management system when you need it most. Then Cubiko creates a flag for each patient and their potential eligibility. This flag is then brought into the cloud and presented to practices. 

Which underlying conditions does Cubiko cover?

The medical conditions that are included in phase 1b are specified on page 13 of the Onboarding Pack for Phase 1b. They are segmented into immunocompromising conditions and other underlying conditions.

Below is the list of underlying conditions that Cubiko will provide indications of when you are looking at your potential eligible patients for Phase 1b. Please note, these are not all of the underlying conditions which are included in Phase 1b, and it is important that you refer to the Onboarding Pack for Phase 1b for the complete list of underlying conditions.

Immunocompromising Conditions 
  • Solid organ transplant recipients who are on immune suppressive therapy
  • Recipients of a bone marrow transplant in the last two years
  • Haematological diseases or cancers, including leukaemia, lymphoma, and myeloma
  • Non-haematological cancer diagnosed in the last 12 months, or currently receiving therapy, or not in remission
  • Chronic inflammatory conditions and treatments (refer to onboarding pack for underlying conditions included)
  • Primary or acquired immunodeficiency, including congenital causes of immunodeficiency and HIV-AIDS
Other underlying conditions
  • Heart disease, including Ischaemic heart disease, valvular heart disease, cardiomyopathies and pulmonary hypertension
  • Chronic lung disease, including of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, cystic fibrosis, interstitial lung disease; but does not include mild or moderate asthma
  • Diabetes
  • Severe obesity with a BMI greater or equal to 40kg/m2
  • Chronic liver disease
  • Some neurological conditions (refer to onboarding pack for underlying conditions included) 
  • Poorly controlled blood pressure (refer to onboarding pack for more details)
In addition to all of these checks, we also indicate whether a patient has any recorded allergies or adverse drug reactions, or whether they have ‘Nil known’ ticked by a Practitioner.
As per the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Cubiko is only providing potential patient eligibility for patients who are over 18+ for the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Potential Patient eligibility for emergency workers

Patients may also be eligible if they are emergency workers. This includes patients who work in defence, police, fire, emergency services and meat processing. Similar to the requirement for health care workers, patients with these lines of work must provide Proof of occupation or the Phase 1b declaration form. Please refer to the Onboarding Pack for phase 1b for further details or you can find more at health.gov.

Also like health care workers, Cubiko uses the patient details you enter as their occupation to find patients who may be an emergency worker.

You’re in control

They will be available to practices on an opt-in basis. It will be up to you and your practice if you want us to provide these insights. 

It’s important to note that Cubiko is not extracting clinical history, medications or other clinical data. Cubiko performs powerful data calculations on your Best Practice server, creates a flag to indicate potential eligible patients and vaccine history and then uses this flag only to show potential eligible patients. 

As always it will be up to your clinical team to make the decision and our metrics are a guide only. The raw clinical data will not leave your server. No data is written back to Best Practice: Cubiko is read-only. 

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