In July 2014, the Victorian Health Minister David Davis stated that “Health Data Analytics could reduce healthcare costs by as much as 30%. A reduction by as little as 10% would see a budget saving of $1.5bn”. This was a powerful acknowledgement that there is a huge gap in Health Data Analytics in Australia.

With an estimated 95% of all health care delivered in general practice and the community, patient data is managed in a highly distributed manner by over 7,000 independent GP surgeries. Privacy, security and consent are major concerns. Collecting primary care data for analytical purposes is, in short, no easy feat.

The Challenge

Our client set us the challenge of assembling a repository of primary care data to assist general practitioners with understanding their clinical activity, how conditions are diagnosed, and how they are treated. The not-for-profit organisation needed a partner who could not only help with designing and developing a data warehouse platform necessary to collect this highly fragmented data, but one who also understood the very specific challenges with managing and interpreting clinical data.

The organisation had already collected the behaviour of over 2,000 GPs and more than two million patients, and had set an ambitious growth target of  quadrupling within two years. To support that kind of growth, a completely new strategic data integration platform was required, designed to cope with complex data sets, transparently implement data cleansing and data interpretation rules, and to comprehensively expose data quality issues.

The Solution

We brought on board a team of experienced data and integration professionals. To support the stated objectives and to enable a Scrum project delivery approach, a Data Vault design methodology was used to create a solid, highly scalable foundation architecture.

Automatic generation of the (ETL) data processing layer using our proprietary Acceler8 development framework further improved the speed of delivery, allowing a limited team of internal development resources to focus on the implementation of complex transformation, interpretation and quality cleansing rules. Fast innovation and exploration were core design principle

Results

Within the larger data warehouse team, our consultants have been supporting the organisation with the development of a strong internal delivery team by providing technical leadership over internal implementation resources, and with advice on Data Vault design best practices.

The data warehouse developed is transformative for the organisation, exposing data faster, cleaner, and more transparently than ever possible before. It is a not just a technical exercise with a technical outcome, but a process with clear benefits not just to the organisation itself but to health care across Australia.

Let’s Talk.

Analytics8 is a specialist data and analytics consulting organisation delivering bespoke solutions across multiple industries.  We focus on data management, advanced analytics, reporting and data visualisation. Our services span the complete data and analytics life-cycle, from strategic planning to implementation and support.