Medicare Local also wants an end to the doubling up of services like immunisation and diabetes care, shifting the healthcare from hospitals and government clinics to GP practices.

And it wants better communication between hospitals and GPs to avoid tests being ordered twice and time being wasted following up patient treatment.

Medicare Local, which represents GPs, nurses, pharmacists and other primary health and consumer groups, has made the suggestions in a submission to the territory budget, pointing to fast and unsustainable increases in health spending.

ACT chairwoman Dr Rashmi Sharma said health spending swallowed 31 per cent of the total budget, driven by an ageing population, new technologies, and the baby boomer generation expecting higher standards.

The fastest growth was in hospital spending.

"At the end of the day, there is not extra funding floating around in health. Things are tight," she said. "What we're saying is engage primary care to be part of the solution."

Dr Sharma said there had been big improvements but communication between the hospital and GP sectors was still quite poor, resulting in delays, duplication of tests and rehospitalisation.

GPs complained about delays in receiving responses from outpatient clinics, difficulty getting hold of specialists, and "the general sense that the system is overburdened".

They sometimes waited up to four months after a patient visited a health clinic, for a letter, she said, and could end up ordering tests that had already been done in hospital, or spent time chasing up results.

"It makes life very difficult for GPs to manage their patients where the communication is not coming," she said, calling for shared care rather than "silos of care".

Immunisation and diabetes care could be handled more frequently through GP clinics, rather than the ACT doubling up by funding its own services, she said.

Dr Sharma said chronic conditions accounted for 80 per cent of disease, and were the main cause of hosptialisation of people aged over 45.

Most could be avoided through lifestyle changes, with more resources directed at the primary care sector.

In the ACT, 21 per cent of hospital admissions in 2011-12 were potentially preventable.

People aged 65 to 75 were twice as likely to be admitted to hospital as the rest of the population, and people aged over 85 were five times more likely. These age groups also had more visits to GPs, used more medication and were in hospital longer.

These costs to the health system were huge, the group said in its submission, urging a study of hospitalisation among older people to establish costs, reasons and how many visits were potentially avoidable.

While 70 per cent of people wanted to die at home, only 14 per cent did so.

Each year, more than $2 billion was spent on older people who die in hospital.

Most people died in acute care settings; many being "actively treated" to the moment of death, with futile treatments, it said, calling for more work on end-of-life care to avoid "overly medicalised" deaths.