This appeared last week:
How Tasmania began crunching COVID-19 hospital data in just days
By Justin Hendry on Jun 26, 2020 12:50PM
Clinical analytics team central to state’s response.
When Tasmania recorded its first cases of coronavirus in early March, the state was already well-placed to respond to the data needs of health staff thanks to an established analytics program.
The Tasmanian Health Service, which is responsible for operational analytics within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), had been busy developing near real-time dashboards for hospital data for the past 18 months.
The dashboards, known as ‘focus boards’ to the more than 600 clinicians and other health staff that regularly use them, have been built on Qlik’s QlikSense data visualisation platform by the service's Clinical Financial Analytics Unit.
They are the natural evolution of DHHS’s first QlikView dashboards that were built to generate health-oriented insights prior to the consolidation of the state’s three health analytics functions in 2016.
Four focus boards for emergency, critical care, occupancy and emergency surgery had been developed, which the unit’s state manager David Deacon told iTnews involved integrating systems and working with the clinicians on the ground.
“[We worked] with clinicians around what are the maths and algorithms to identify patients at risk at the beginning and how we can provide that to them in a real visualised way because that’s the future,” he said.
The unit is also behind the state's HEART (health executive analytics reporting tool) dashboard platform, which pulls data from the emergency department system and inpatient system to show trends over a 12-month period.
“At the very top level of the dashboard is the highest matrix, which shows the length of stay of patients, how many falls [have occurred], how many medication errors across the hospital space,” Deacon said.
“And then the next layer down, a little bit more about the analytics, so ... the confidence intervals, how many patients went on this day, this month this year, and then we can get right down to patient level data.”
That groundwork meant that when COVID-19 struck the Apple Isle on March 3 and was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation a week later, it took the unit - which consists of just 9 staff - less than four days to create a dedicated coronavirus dashboard.
“When the pandemic was announced, it didn’t take us very long. We were around about three to four days and we were able to pop up this COVID focus board that included a state-wide view,” Deacon said.
“So we could say, everyone in the North-West, the North and the South [regions] were able to look at all patients crossing over those borders, and where they were located because that’s what the pandemic was all about.”
The dashboard also allowed the department’s emergency command centres to visualise inpatients throughout hospitals, as it plucks feeds from the emergency system and the inpatient system every five minutes.
Lots more here:
This is a good read and shows how some basic analytics can make a difference and help a small State stay well on top of what is happening and provide the public health staff with the information to make the best decisions.
I am sure Premier Gutwein had an instance of the dashboard on his desk!
David.
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