Mt Druitt doctor’s data-driven practice

General practitioner Dr Kean-Seng Lim discusses the ‘art of medicine’ and more with the MJA.

The AMA’s journal—the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)—this week features a podcast interview with Dr Kean-Seng Lim. Dr Lim is a GP, former President of AMA NSW, and this year’s recipient of the AMA Excellence in Healthcare award.

Dr Lim spoke to MJA news and online editor Cate Swannell and in a wide-ranging discussion offered his thoughts on the present and future of general practice in Australia.

He told the MJA he was not immediately drawn to general practice, but it was on his list of career paths.

“General practice was always on my list of possible medical specialties to enter, and it wasn't the only one. Ultimately why I chose general practice comes down to why I chose medicine in the first place—so for me medicine was about people. It was a combination of being able to apply a certain type of skill set, so that sort of scientific skill set, but also that organisational type skill set, to helping people. So it's very much about people.”

Dr Lim said that working in the hospital system gave him perspective as to how general practice might better align with his own healthcare interests.

“What I was seeing was a health system which was based on episodic care, whereas what we needed to provide for patients was that continuous care. That continuity of care meant that your treatment episodes, instead of becoming just a single hospital separation, actually became over a whole patient lifetime. That was what drew me to general practice because this was a specialty where I could actually do that.”

Dr Lim has been practicing for 28 years in Mt Druitt in Sydney’s outer west, and he told the MJA about that anyone with an interest in ‘health equity’ knows that a patient’s postcode is a large determinant in their own health issues. In Mt Druitt he said overweight and obesity is overrepresented among the population when compared to the national average, and pointed to social factors that might lead to this such as a high ratio of junk food outlets compared to healthy ones, and low amounts of greenspace compared to other areas.

He pointed to the power of preventative medicine telling the MJA his practice has a lower-than-average number of smokers compared to the national average, to which he suggests years of his practice’s work to discourage patients from smoking has led to demonstrable results.

This example speaks to Dr Lim’s passion for data-driven healthcare and the ways in which improved data collection has allowed for a longitudinal analysis of patient health. He discussed the various ways in which he thought data collection, including remote device data collection from patients, could lead to improvements in healthcare, especially in general practice.