Ambulance Victoria eyes Azure-based predictive analytics platform

Ambulance Victoria will deploy a predictive analytics platform underpinned by Microsoft Azure over the next two years to give its paramedics access to real-time to information.

The state's ambulance service has put out the call for the ‘next-gen’ platform, which is intended to improve and accelerate decision making as demand for emergency services increases.

It is expected to “provide real-time information into ‘what is happening’ and ‘what will happen’”.

The agency currently has business intelligence capabilities, but data is largely provided after-the-fact and “does little or nothing to enable decision support”.

The data is also mostly “manually handled and carries significant lag (particularly quality and resource or supply data)”.

“With existing ICT system and technologies, AV currently lacks capabilities and tools to monitor and improve performance as well as support divisions in real time, making the existing technology platforms on of the key challenges in delivering better patient outcomes,” the agency said.

After settling on Microsoft Azure as the platform to deliver the predictive analytics platform through a technology selection process, the agency is now looking for a single ‘primary platform supplier’ to implement and support the platform for up to the next eight years.

However a panel of suppliers will also be appointed to assist the “delivery of solutions and to expedite the delivery of new capabilities” such as data ingestion and dashboards for the same period.

The platform, which will be capable of storing structure data in the data warehouse and unstructured data in the data lake, will support “data mining, machine learning, contextual models and AI to draw rich insights”.

It will also provide a ‘Single Pane of Glass’ that gives staff access to information that is currently contained across multiple application and environments such as paramedic backfill and short term rostering.

This requires that the platform interface with “other health sector systems” and “have the ability to focus on different attributes such as Patients, Events and Paramedics”.

The primary platform supplier will need to work with AV’s IT team and Microsoft to ensure the cloud-based platform - and the data exchange between the AV network and the platform - is secure.

The supplier will also be responsible for master data management, which the agency describes as “significant work program” for the success of the program.

“AV currently do not use a master management platform to manage all of its master and reference data’ processes around the management of data as well as lack of standardisation and naming conventions etc. have left a lot to be desired,” tender documents state.

It currently uses a Microsoft Dynamics-based system called Ambulance Victoria Reference Data Set (AVRDS) to manage reference data.

The agency said it intended to run the “work package as a separate stream while the platform for predictive analytics is being implemented”.