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Gippsland Health Alliance (GHA), a publicly-funded shared service, switched from an on-premise datacenter to cloud in February, 2023.
With the help of data strategy and analytics firm, Notitia, and their team, the project took only a month to complete and expanded GHA’s data service to their regional client health sites.
Asher Brooks, GHA Lead Reporting and Business Intelligence Developer, said that GHA’s goal was to expand Qlik’s capabilities to all client health sites in the most cost effective way.
“There was a fair bit of work involved: migrating 500 existing apps, creating dashboards, adding data into the cloud, ensuring that the right security parameters were in place, and testing the functionality, before our clients were seamlessly moved over to the cloud,”
“We wanted the project executed quickly and effectively, which is why we engaged Notitia to provide us with the extra resources we needed during the project phase.”
Six months after implementing the Qlik Sense SaaS solution, GHA and their clients have seen the positive impact on health care in Victoria’s Gippsland Region. “GHA provides shared data analytics services to 17 regional health centres and hospitals, including LaTrobe Regional Hospital,” Mr Brooks said.
“We believe that sharing best practices, resources and collaboration is the key to boosting the efficiency of the regional health sector as a whole.
“The journey that GHA has been on, over the past few years, has been about establishing ways for our customers to collaborate with data and reporting - because this can become easily siloed, which works against what we aim to achieve.”
Qlik’s cloud solution has been pivotal in the digital transformation of healthcare across Gippsland.
GHA’s customers, the regional health sites, now all have access to the same data, while ensuring the maintenance of critical privacy and security restrictions.
Mr Brooks said that rolling out Qlik Sense SaaS across its customers has improved the continuum of healthcare in the region over the past six months.
“Each health site, and specific job roles, can now access secured data that relates directly to the patient’s continuum of care,” Mr Brooks said.
GHA assists two types of customers - larger hospitals, who have analysts on site, and smaller health sites which rely solely on GHA’s data support services, Mr Brooks says.
“The larger hospitals in our region benefit from having access to our secured data so that they can build their own reports using their data analysts,” he says.
“In these cases, our role is to ensure that they have access to quality data on time and it’s in a way that is easily accessible - this is our main priority for those customers.
”GHA’s focus is providing the regional health sector with access to the same information and trustworthy data - no matter how big or small their service is, Mr Brooks says.
“We help other health sites that don’t have additional resources on site and we fill that role of ‘data analyst’ for them - we create end user reports and deploy them for their use,” he says.
“For these customers, it's not just about gathering data and making it available, we actually compile the reports and build the dashboards and present it in a way that the data can be easily consumed and communicated within their business.”
The benefit is delivered right through this chain of users, resulting in a positive impact on the optimisation of patient experience, Mr Brooks said.
“As a patient I could visit Latrobe Hospital in an emergency, but I could also go to another hospital in my region for separate episodic care - each hospital has provided me with an outcome for my visit,” he says.
“We’ve managed to essentially replicate that patient journey in our Qlik analytics environment.
“It means that some of our customers will have access to data which is shared, such as patient and diagnosis, but there's also a separation between sensitive information such as the visit data and HR.”
Notitia assisted GHA to leverage the power of distributed cloud computing, while retaining the benefits of their existing investment in on-premise infrastructure.
This hybrid cloud strategy balanced the advantages of both cloud and on-premise infrastructure.GHA is now well positioned to adapt to changing business needs, while maintaining data security and compliance.
● All the benefits of a cloud platform: scalability that allows for big data storage and analytics, performance, improved backup, disaster recovery and data security, decreased cyber security risk and centralised governance.
● No rebuild costs for business logic, as existing models could be transported.
● Reduced capital costs associated with hardware provisioning.
● Embeddable analytics into existing clinical and operational tools.
● Real-time Emergency Department wait times published online to Gippsland patients and residents.
● Automation of administrative and low-value maintenance tasks. Time and resourcing eliminated for routine maintenance and updates. Maximising GHA development time to focus on improving their data products, rather than maintaining an environment.
● Immediate access to data that can be accessed remotely, in any location and on any secured device, allowing for greater continuity and collaboration.
This level of visibility has improved the continuum of healthcare in the Gippsland region, Mr Brooks says.
“All of our customers - our regional health sites - are each so committed to providing their patients with the best care and health outcomes that they can,” he says.
“In particular, LaTrobe Regional Hospital has championed the journey of digital transformation for their patients, over the past few years.
“Being on this digital transformation journey alongside them, with each clinic and hospital working together, has positively impacted patient experience and operational outputs.”
Gippsland Health Alliance (GHA), provides publicly funded health services in the Gippsland region. GHA is one of five Rural Health Alliances established by the former Department of Human Services (now Services Australia). With the overarching objective to provide timely information to health professionals and administrators, wherever needed. GHA maximises the effectiveness of patient care and optimises the use of scarce resources to help health providers and the community.
