What counts as Measuring Outcomes (MO) for RACGP CPD?

Measuring Outcomes (MO) is the third RACGP CPD category and — alongside Reviewing Performance — the one most GPs leave to the last quarter of the year. Unlike Educational Activities, MO requires you to look at your own data. That's the whole point: it's the category designed to close the loop between what you've learned and what you actually do in your clinic.

The shape of MO

The test for MO is simple: you're examining your own practice data against an evidence-based benchmark. Not a colleague's data, not a synthetic case, not someone's published cohort. Your data. Your patients. Your prescribing patterns, your screening uptake, your test ordering, your follow-up rates.

The activity has a recognisable structure:

A clinical question with a benchmark you can measure against.
Data drawn from your EMR (Best Practice, Medical Director, equivalent).
A count or percentage tallied against the benchmark.
Your interpretation of the gap (or absence of one).
A specific action you'll take.
A re-audit planned for 6-12 months later.

Activities that clearly count

Clinical audit of a chronic-disease cohort. % of T2DM patients on an SGLT2i meeting eligibility. % of AF patients anticoagulated. % of CKD3+ patients on an ACEi/ARB.
Preventive-care audit. % of women aged 25-74 with up-to-date cervical screening. % of patients ≥ 65 with a current advance care directive.
Prescribing audit. % of antibiotic prescriptions matching Therapeutic Guidelines indication. % of opioid prescribing within Practice Incentive Program targets.
Investigation-ordering audit. Rate of inappropriate vitamin D testing, MRI knee referrals, repeat lipid panels.
Practice-level outcomes review. Outcomes of patients you've discharged to follow-up elsewhere; lost-to-follow-up rates for chronic-disease patients.
PIP-QI-style continuous improvement work. The data-driven improvement work practices do under PIP-QI is MO by design.

Activities that don't count as MO

Reading a guideline. That's EA.
A peer-discussion of your prescribing. Closer — but if a colleague is informing your practice, that's RP, not MO. The distinction is whose perspective the data is. Your own data examined against an objective benchmark = MO. Someone else's view of your practice = RP.
Simulated audit on dummy data. The activity needs to be your own patients to count.
Reading the results of a published audit by someone else. That's EA.
An audit you started but didn't decide an action on. The action and follow-up are non-negotiable parts of MO. Without them, you've done a data-pull, not an audit.

The 5-hour minimum and the combined-minimum rule

RACGP 2026 requires at least 5 hours of MO per year. It also requires that MO + RP combined ≥ 25 hours. So MO at 5 hours leaves you needing 20 hours of RP, which is harder to organise than 20 hours of MO.

Practically, that means most GPs should plan for 10-15 hours of MO to balance the year. That sounds like a lot — but a single substantive audit (pick topic, pull data, analyse, decide on action, write it up, plan re-audit) sits comfortably in the 3-5 hour range. Two or three over a year does it.

The most common MO mistakes

Audit without action. You ran the report, you have the percentages, you didn't decide what to change. RACGP audit will flag this. The action is the whole point.
Audit too small to matter. A 5-patient sample isn't an audit. Aim for 20-30 patients minimum.
Audit too big to finish. "I'll audit my whole diabetes cohort" is the road to a never-completed audit. Pick a slice.
No re-audit planned. MO is meant to be a cycle. Without a follow-up date, it's a snapshot, not a process.

How PracticaCPD handles MO

Every Pro module includes a built-in audit step. The audit template is profession-relevant, scoped to ~20 patients, benchmarked against current Australian guidelines, and includes the action + re-audit fields. You download the docx, complete it offline against your EMR (patient identifiers never leave your machine), upload it as evidence, and the module completion auto-logs the MO hours.

A typical module credits 1-2 hours of MO. Eight Pro modules in a year takes you well past the 5-hour minimum and meaningfully into the combined-minimum rule.