Routine primary care data for scientific research, quality of care programs and educational purposes: the Julius General Practitioners' Network (JGPN)

Background: General Practitioners (GPs) in the Netherlands routinely register all patient contacts electronically. These records include longitudinally gathered clinical information of the patient contacts in coded data and free text. Methods: Diagnoses are coded according to the International Coding of Primary Care (ICPC). Drug prescriptions are labelled with the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification (ATC), and letters of hospital specialists and paramedic health care professionals are linked or directly incorporated in the electronic medical files. A network of a large group of GPs collecting routine care data on an ongoing basis can be used for answering various research questions. Results: The Julius General Practitioners' Network (JGPN) database consists of routine care data from over ten years of a dynamic cohort of around 370,000 individuals registered with the participating GPs from the city of Utrecht and its vicinity. Health care data are extracted anonymously every quartile of a year and these data are used by researchers. Conclusion: We describe the content and usability of our JGPN database, and how a wide variety of research questions could be answered, as illustrated with examples of published articles.