Opinions of Primary Care Family Physicians in İstanbul about The New National Noncommunicable Chronic Diseases Management Programme

Hilal Özkaya, Güzin Zeren Öztürk, Yasemin Doğan Kaya, Pemra C. Unalan, Didem Kafadar, Hülya Akan, Memet Taşkın Egici, Buğu Usanma Koban, Sabah Tüzün, Senem Aslan, Kemal Murat Ünalmış

Keywords: Primary care, chronic disease, clinical decision support system, family physician

Background:
Prevalence of chronic diseases is increasing worldwide.As a result, regulations regarding chronic disease follow-up in primary care have come in force. A new web-based programme called HYP (Disease Management Platform) has been implemented in 2021 to the family medicine system in Turkey.

Research questions:
What are the opinions of family physicians about HYP system ? Is the application user-friendly? Which aspects of the system need improvements?

Method:
For this cross-sectional descriptive study, a form having 21 questions was applied to the family physicians working in İstanbul through digital sources between 05-20 January, 2022. After sampling, 138 physicians who gave consent to the study were included.

Results:
A total of 138 physicians consisting of 75(54.34%) women and 63(45.65%) men with a mean age of 41.52±9.35 were included to the study.The mean registered patient population of family physicians was 3352.44±690.44 Those who have explored HYP system were 123 (89.13%), among them 89.43% have reported that it was not user-friendly.The average number of patients who thought they could log into the HYP system was 5.40/day besides the routine work of the primary care center.Only 25(18.11%) physicians stated that they were informed about the new system before it was implemented.
The disadvantages of the HYP system were conveyed as involving some tests which are not present in the primary care orders(%85.50), not putting any responsibility on the patients for their own chronic disease follow-up (%84.78) and the long period needed to evaluate the patient using the web-based application (84.05%) respectively. As the most common advantage, providing standard and regular follow-up of preventive medicine practices (46.37%).

Conclusions:
Most of our participants have explored the new system and had positive opinions on its advantages which shows that they had positive attitudes for chronic disease follow-up. However, the disadvantages conveyed have to be considered by the policy makers.

Points for discussion:
What are main aspects to consider in implementing follow-up programmes?

What is the importance and return of patient responsibility in follow-up?