ANZ healthcare providers facing an unprecedented amount of real-time data

Healthcare providers across Australia and New Zealand have scaled up efforts to maximise the use of real-time data for decision-making through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout the pandemic, healthcare providers have operated in complicated, urgent and rapidly shifting circumstances. They have increased their use of analytics to better leverage real-time data and continue serving patients effectively.

Business analytics company, Qlik, says due to COVID-19, healthcare institutions and government departments are now having to manage unprecedented amounts of data.

These organisations have been forced to reinforce their data capabilities. And even healthcare institutions with robust analytics programs need to break down internal data silos further and bring more real-time, context-aware data to their decision-making.

"This has driven tremendous interest in adopting Qlik as a catalyst to quickly modernise data pipelines and analytics to leverage data that drives action," says Qlik ANZ country manager, Paul Leahy.

"Qlik's data analytics platform has been critical to supporting healthcare organisations in rapidly managing changing data analytics needs during the pandemic.

"These healthcare providers have embraced Qlik's vision of Active Intelligence, the ability to leverage real-time, up-to-date information to inform decision-making in rapidly changing market conditions," he says.

Qlik maintains a significant market share of government agencies in the regional healthcare sector, with clients spanning almost two-thirds of all state health departments in Australia. The SaaS company is utilised in several healthcare organisations across Australia and New Zealand, including the New Zealand Ministry of Health, Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network, South Australia Health, Tasmanian Health Service and Waikato District Health Board.

When Tasmania recorded its first cases of COVID-19 in early March 2020, the state was already well-prepared to respond. The Tasmanian Health Service, responsible for operational analytics within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), had been developing near real-time dashboards for hospital data for the past 18-months.

"When COVID-19 struck in March last year, it took our unit of nine staff members less than four days to create a dedicated coronavirus dashboard, featuring a state-wide view," says Tasmanian Health Service state manager, David Deacon.

"The dashboard allows our emergency command centres to visualise hospital inpatients and show how many people have been moved across to COVID-19 areas. We can also see how many are quarantined, suspected, undergoing testing, how many of those are positive cases, and where in the hospital they're located."

The Qlik director of industry solutions for healthcare and the public sector, Charlie Farah, says the pandemic reinforces the point of view that data is critical to decision-making.

However, he says, setting up a robust data pipeline with governance structures in place takes work. "The public sector has a real opportunity to take the lessons learnt during COVID-19 to create new ways to serve citizens by using data as the foundation. Cross agency data sharing and promoting high rates of data literacy will be pivotal to achieving this."