Background A national quality improvement programme to understand how medicines are used was launched in 2011. The programme collects clinical data from general practice electronic health records to identify prescribing/management gaps.

Context The delivery of primary care is complex. The majority of medicines are prescribed by GPs. There is huge potential to use routinely collected clinical information to reduce evidence-treatment gaps and improve population health outcomes.

Description of Best Practice A scan of the literature and keynote international and national agencies is undertaken to identify the range of interventions and tools that support change in general practice prescribing. Activities reported as most effective, value for money and applicable to general practice, with a focus on those using prescribing or clinical data as key inputs are collated (including which activities were used singly or in combination). These activities are entered into an overarching intervention framework for data driven activities in general practice. A group of local clinical experts are invited to identify the barriers and enablers to apply this framework to the local primary care sector. Three topic areas are selected to model these approaches and verify the elements of the framework. An implementation plan including evaluation of effectiveness will be presented.

Lessons for Guideline Developers, Adaptors, Implementers, and/or Users The design of the intervention framework illustrates ways to design an ‘implementation strategy’ that draws on three dimensions:literature on effectiveness of implementation interventions; applied experience of clinical leaders; local context of primary care.