General Medical Subsidy collection
The General Medical Subsidy (GMS) collection contains data on the fee-for-service payments made to doctors for patient visits.
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About the GMS collection
The GMS collection is used to:
- track contracts with providers
- support the forecasting and setting of budgets
- enable the analysis of health needs.
Originally, most patient visits to general practitioners would have resulted in a fee-for-service GMS claim. Since 2003, capitation payments made through primary health organisations (PHOs) have progressively replaced fee-for-service claiming. Now GMS claims are made of only a limited number of patient visits of specific types.
Using the collection
The GMS data mart was established in August 2003 and contains data from November 2001.
All data transferred from Sector Operations to the GMS data mart is claim-related data sent by claimants. Definitions in the GMS data mart data dictionary are based on the GP Section 88 Notice.
The GMS data mart includes only health events processed by Sector Operations. Since the introduction of PHOs, capitation payments have reduced the number of fee-for-service claims considerably. As a result of this, most health events are not included in the GMS data mart.
More information is in the GMS data mart data dictionary.
General Medical Subsidy data mart data dictionary — Data dictionaries
All transactional data is sourced from Sector Operations Proclaim system. It is loaded into the GMS data mart using an intermediate data store (the IDS).
The GMS data mart receives monthly extracts from Sector Operations from the IDS.
The GMS data mart is accessed by authorised Health NZ staff for the purposes of:
- maintenance
- data quality
- audit
- analytics.
Authorised members of the Ministry of Health and Health NZ have access to the collection for analytical purposes, using Business Objects and the secure Health Information Network. Business Objects contains a subset of the data described in the data dictionary.
Business Objects is being decommissioned.
We are required to make sure that the release of information meets the conditions of any legislation related to the privacy of health information. In particular the:
- Official Information Act 1982
- Privacy Act 2020
- Health Information Privacy Code 2020.
Information available to the general public is of a statistical and non-identifiable nature. A data release policy covers approval where appropriate from a health ethics committee.
Sector Operations releases monthly reports to the Health NZ districts on the Health Information Network.
Customised datasets or summary reports are available on request. These can be electronic or on paper.
Our team can help to define the specifications for a request and are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the data.
We also offer a peer review service to make sure Health NZ data is reported appropriately when published by other organisations.
There may be charges associated with data extracts.
Contact
For more information about this collection or to ask for specific datasets or reports email data-enquiries@health.govt.nz