ACT Health turns to analytics to cure performance woes

ACT Health has set about introducing a real-time data analytics platform to address its troublesome performance reporting, while a system-wide review of the territory's health data management processes continues.

The review was ordered by Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris earlier this year after ACT Health failed to provide the Productivity Commission with emergency department figures for benchmarking with other jurisdictions, because of concerns with data accuracy.

Once the cause of the health directorate's ongoing data issues are understood, revised governance arrangements for data management and a framework for essential data reports willl be introduced, and the territoy's data warehouse will be rebuilt.

Ahead of the completion of the review, ACT Health has begun searching for a supplier to perform descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analysis of clinical delivery to improve internal and external performance reporting against KPIs and other metrics.

“ACT Health is required to report against specific performance measures to national bodies such as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare,” tender documents state.

“This information is passed to the COAG reform council to determine state and territory performance against agreed targets.”

The supplier will provide data analytics services such as real-time dashboard reports and probabilities and trends identification, as well as a platform to provide analytical tools that “enable the explorations of large, complex data sets by relatively non-skilled users and inform programs to improve patient and population outcomes”.

The platform will source information from the ACT Health patient administration system (ACTPAS), emergency department information system (EDIS), RiskMan centralised integrated incident and risk management system, and the Metavision ICU electronic clinical information system.

The supplier will also be expected to assess “data collection process and outline their approach to identify and address any data and information gaps”.