West Gippsland Healthcare Group (WGHG): Data & Digital Transformation in Healthcare

West Gippsland Healthcare Group (WGHG), Notitia & Qlik: Driving Data & Digital Transformation in Healthcare

Notitia’s client, West Gippsland Healthcare Group (WGHG), was interviewed by Digital Nation about their recent digital transformation which saw it embed data-driven decision making within the organisation.

WGHG and Notitia partnered on a solution which involved automated reporting with UX UI designed Qlik Sense (Cloud SaaS) dashboards and data literacy training to empower internal stakeholders to use their data.

Notitia provided the end-to-end management and execution, alongside West Gippsland Healthcare Group’s activity-based funding manager, Robyn Weeks, and clinical data analyst, Adam Slattery. Leveraging Notitia’s team was cost effective for the health organisation to quickly implement the project, with industry leading Qlik technology and tools.

‍Robyn and Adam told Digital Nation editor, Kate Weber, about the immediate operational benefits that have come with overhauling the way that data is captured, delivered and used.

“The availability of health data in an EMR provides the opportunity for real time in-house analysis using clinical results to improve the quality of data and accuracy within reporting, rather than repeated long manual processes and referring to paper based records,” Adam told Digital Nation.

“We’ve now got a lot of this information at hand in a system at the ready to assist and inform and allow us to make decisions much quicker than ever before as an organisation that actually affects us across the board,” he said.

Frontline, clinicians and admin staff have all realised the benefits of time saving.

It provides, at the fingertips, the ability to drill down to information levels that we’ve never had before, Robyn told Digital Nation.

“A good example is clinicians looking at chest pain - they’re able to look at their treatment framework and matrix to determine potential gaps in diagnoses or education for their staff,” Robyn said.

“So instead of manually going through each case, what they’ve been able to do now is get the results back from testing to determine the files that they look at and the staff to go back and educate - so it’s been a really good time save for the clinicians on the ground.

“Overall the work has led to positive changes - digital health is very exciting.”

Robyn said that as a public health organisation, WGHG’s framework is governed by the Department of Health, Victoria and the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.

“It is a very exciting time, I think there is a lot of scope that will come through health,” she said.

“We’re seeing some places in Melbourne use wearable personal devices to help with service and monitoring.

“Over the next five to 10 years what we are talking about today will be very different due to the pace and the speed of how (digital technology) goes through the (government framework) restrictions.”

Working with Notitia: Data Governance Framework, Automated Reporting & Data Quality Framework

WGHG and Notitia had three main objectives for their digital transformation project, Adam said.

The first objective was to embed a data governance framework as the foundation of the strategy.

“We sought to establish a data governance framework defining clear roles, responsibilities and processes, which would be a tool to guide us through the project and that also enhanced the confidence and trust in the quality of data that we would be maintaining into the future,” he said.

“As part of this, it required a unique skill set so we also sought external advice from Notitia mainly for aspects around the correct approach to this solution on how to make it effective and trustworthy.

Notitia and WGHG’s next step was to set up automated reporting with UX UI designed Qlik Sense ( Cloud SaaS) dashboards.

“The next main objective was to produce a self-service reporting system with many distributed systems in various areas reporting from a number of manual mechanisms.”

“It needed to be an intuitive solution and also provide flexibility and really enable decision makers to have the ability to drill down to any level of detail that they require to make informed decisions,” he said.

Our third objective was to develop a data quality framework, Adam said.

“This allows us to maintain quality systems internally from our data and moving forward into our reporting,” he said.

“So essentially we set out to build a single source of truth that provides a holistic view for our organisation’s activity reporting and effectively report in all other areas of the organisation as well.”

The Results: Data Driven Decisions Improving Operations

A really good example of how improved access to quality data has transformed the health organisation is that their staff has been able to use evidence to back assumptions, says Robyn.

“It’s been able to allow them to test theories and challenge inherent biases that either managers or service think that they have, we can actually drill down on the data and clearly and really quickly determine,” she said.

Adam says that the results of the reporting has made a huge impact across the organisation.

“We initially introduced activity reporting to our executive team and they’re actually finding that very useful,” he said.

“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 it may not look to be the case and there may be a reason for it.

“Once you actually dig into the data and classify things a little bit differently, it starts to paint a bit of a different picture - that’s a very good eye opener for our executive team and a very powerful tool.”

Looking to the future: Using data to gather more healthcare insights

The future for WGHG is more meaningful data, says Robyn.

“Our next step is further importing the data we have - we have external data already in our single source of truth, which is helping the data quality and validations between our internal systems, " she says.

“But there is data everywhere, so it’s about bringing in more of what’s meaningful.

“A lot of the reporting we do now is really useful for exec and the board, in particular how we are going against our Department of Health, Victoria defined priorities that we have.

“So it’s been quite useful in that space to have our finger on the pulse.”

Robyn also explains that they are part way through rolling out tailored data and reporting for each department.

“They’re hungry for data - they want to know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it - and they want to use it, which is really good,” she said.

Find out more about Notitia working in healthcare here.