Turning Murrumbidgee data into better health decisions
At a glance
55% of Murrumbidgee general practices contribute data to LUMOS,
6new general practices signed up to LUMOS in 2025-2026
34 six-monthly patient reports sent to participating practices
MPHN assisted UNSW student to use LUMOS data in research project
What if we could see more clearly how people move through the health system and use that knowledge to design better healthcare?
That is the opportunity LUMOS is creating for the Murrumbidgee, and in 2025-2026 participation from local general practices continued to grow.
LUMOS (Linked Data for Better Health) securely links de-identified general practice data with other NSW health data, including emergency department presentations, hospital admissions, ambulance call-outs, cancer and death registries. The result is a much richer picture of the patient journey and the interaction between primary and hospital care.
For Murrumbidgee Primary Health Network (MPHN), LUMOS is a cornerstone of a more sophisticated approach to health intelligence.
“LUMOS is one of the first pieces of health intelligence,” MPHN Senior Manager Health Intelligence Ryan Du Toit said. “When we start to consider all the data together, that’s when the intelligence component is activated.”
That intelligence has enormous practical potential. It can help MPHN understand where people are accessing care, identify gaps and emerging trends, build stronger cases for funding and determine where new or commissioned services could have the greatest impact. Combined with MPHN’s commissioning data, regularly updated general practice data and community insights gathered through activities like Conversations on the Couch, it creates an increasingly powerful evidence base for decision-making.
More practices joining LUMOS makes that evidence stronger. During 2025-2026, MPHN onboarded six additional practices, increasing the representativeness of the regional dataset. Participating practices also receive six-monthly individualised reports providing insights into their own patients – including why they are presenting to emergency departments and opportunities to strengthen care – that can be used for evidence-based practice improvement.
Importantly, MPHN is moving beyond collecting data to building the capability to use it. During the year, the Health Intelligence team supported a UNSW medical student to undertake research using LUMOS data, exploring the relationship between general practice and emergency department presentations and characteristics associated with greater risk of hospital care.
It is a small project that points to a much bigger ambition: attracting more students, clinicians and researchers to interrogate regional data, generate locally relevant evidence and potentially strengthen the rural health workforce.
“There’s more data in there than we have the capacity to process,” Dr Du Toit said. “It’s an absolute treasure trove. It just needs to be analysed.”
As LUMOS marks 10 years and has grown to become Australia’s largest linked-data asset of its kind, MPHN’s focus is firmly on what comes next: using better intelligence to anticipate need, advocate for the Murrumbidgee and make smarter decisions about healthcare investment.
“The real opportunity with LUMOS is to move from being reactive to proactive,” Dr Du Toit said. “If we can understand what’s happening across our health system now, identify where the greatest needs are and keep building that evidence over time, we can make smarter decisions about where services and investment should go. It also gives us a much stronger voice to advocate for the Murrumbidgee. We have the data to tell our region’s story, and if we don’t use it to plan for the future, no one else is going to do it for us.”
Note from Ryan: Potential images include a photo of the student and MPHN supervisor, subject to consent, or photographs from the LUMOS Symposium after the event. No existing image location has been confirmed.