Case Study: West Gippsland Healthcare Group centralises data capabilities

West Gippsland Healthcare Group has managed to centralise the way it utilises data capabilities to build out improved operational efficiencies.

Under its digital upgrades the organisation, which provides healthcare across the Shire of Baw Baw, east of Melbourne, now has a single source of truth that allows for the visualisation of the whole patient journey through the health system.

Adam Slattery, clinical data analyst for the healthcare group told Digital Nation the availability of health data in an eMR (electronic medical record), “provides the opportunity for real-time in-house analysis using clinical results to improve the quality and of data and accuracy within reporting”.

The team deployed Notitia’s cloud-based Qilk Sense dashboards as part of a three-pronged approach to improve the old delivery methods of “repeated long manual processes” and “referring to paper-based records”.

“We've now got a lot of this information at hand in the system, at the ready, to assist, inform and allow us to make decisions much quicker than ever before.

“As an organisation that affects us across the board, whether it's frontline staff that clinicians or even admin staff,” Slattery said.

Robyn Weeks, activity based funding manager also told Digital Nation the new upgrades have led to time saved for its healthcare workers

“In regards to the fast-tracking of health, it provides at the fingertips the data to be able to drill down to information levels that we've never had before.

“A good example is clinicians looking at chest pain- they're able to look at their treatment framework matrix to determine potential gaps in diagnosis or education for their staff.

“Instead of manually going through each case, what they've been able to do is get the results back from testing regimes to determine the files that they look at and the staff to go back and educate,” Weeks said.

As many healthcare groups work through various digital undertakings, Weeks added digital health is “very exciting.”

“There are so many spheres to what it encompasses -it's mobile health, it's health information technology, it's wearable devices, it's your telehealth, telemedicine, personalised medicine.

“If you look internationally too, that's been heavily embraced as well and because we're a public organisation, our framework is governed around the use of those things through the Department of Health Victoria and the federal government's, Department of Health.”

As the organisation follows these guidelines, the transformation work also falls in alignment with the National Healthcare Agreement, enabling greater patient transparency.

Slattery added results so far include the team at the healthcare organisation finding the system useful for gaining insights.

“The ability to answer a question, or to respond to a statement where one would normally say ‘I'm observing this particular activity, so we must come to this particular conclusion’, we actually have the opportunity to dig into the data and say from a high level that may look to be the case and there may be a reason for it.

“But once you actually dig into the data and classify things a little bit differently, it starts to paint a bit of a different picture and I think that's a very good eye opener for our executive team and a very powerful tool,” Slattery said.

Next steps include “further importing the more data we have”, according to Weeks.

“We have external data already in our central source of truth, which is helping the data quality and validations between our internal systems, so it's looking at even more.

“There is data everywhere, so it’s about bringing in what's meaningful and bringing more data here and more KPI framework.

“But a lot of the reporting we do now is useful for exec and board in particular about how we're going against our department health defined set priorities that we have.

“It's been quite useful in that space to have a finger on the pulse in there. It's looking at community health. It's looking at more detailed information regarding our surgical platforms, more department-specific platforms.

“What we're partway through the process of is looking at unit-specific areas and targets, which creates a really good platform for ownership from the clinical teams around what their space is doing, not only ownership of the data but understanding the drivers in and behind it and how that they might refine some of their clinical practices or processes,” Weeks said.