Familial Hypercholesterolaemia launch Jan17

PRIMIS is delighted to introduce the Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (FH) quality improvement tool, which is now freely available to PRIMIS Hub members.

The FH quality improvement tool has been designed to help practices case find patients who may have FH but also may be missing a coded diagnosis.

Early identification and effective treatment of FH patients can help to ensure normal life expectancy.

This quality improvement tool helps practices by:

• generating a list of patients who may have FH but who do not have a coded diagnosis
• establishing a more accurate prevalence rate for FH within the practice population
• identifying patients who are at increased risk of developing FH and categorising them by level of risk (using the FAMCAT algorithm¹)
• highlighting patients with the disease who are currently untreated
• identifying opportunities to optimise lipid lowering treatment regimes for all patients with the disease
• providing a mail merge function to generate letters to send to high risk patients about collecting their family history
• offering a comparative analysis service via CHART Online, which enables comparison with other practices, locally or nationally
• highlighting recording rate of important family history information
• contributing to the delivery of the NHS Outcomes Framework and the Clinical Commissioning Group Outcomes Indicator Set
• providing data in a format for appraisal and revalidation and providing a method for GPs to reflect on their clinical practice

See the Familial Hypercholesterolaemia quality improvement tool webpage for further details, plus the quick guide and instruction booklet that accompanies the tool.

Development of Familial Hypercholesterolaemia

PRIMIS' development of this tool was part supported by independent funding from Amgen.

The development of the Familial Hypercholesterolaemia quality improvement tool was developed in collaboration with the Applied Genetics and Ethnicity research group at The University of Nottingham. This tool is based on the FAMCAT algorithm¹ developed by academics in the Applied Genetics and Ethnicity research group.

1 Weng SF, Kai J, Neil HA, Humphries SE, Qureshi N. Improving identification of familial hypercholesterolaemia in primary care: Derivation and validation of the familial hypercholesterolaemia case ascertainment tool (FAMCAT).  Atherosclerosis 2015; 238(2):336-43 doi:10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2014.12.034.

Availability

The Familial Hypercholesterolaemia quality improvement tool is freely available to PRIMIS Hub members.

Obtaining the FH quality improvement tool

• you must to be a member of PRIMIS Hub - register for free membership
• you MUST be running the latest version of CHART. See the CHART page on how to check for, download and install CHART 
• download the audit tool via the 'Check for Updates' link within CHART

Documentation explaining the installation of CHART and downloading and installing audit tools is explained both on the CHART information page