INSIGHTS - April 2019 Update

Communications channels for requests or support

Channel your mind! Did you know there are a couple of ways that you can request support or add new users in your health service? The platform and the Health Roundtable website have the Zendesk chat enabled for channeling questions directly to the analysts in the Sydney office. 

If you happen to not be logged into those sites you can email the same team directly using the address: contact@healthroundtable.org. The advantage of putting requests through these channels is that your request will be picked up immediately by the team (during a working day) and increase your chances of getting a speedier response.

Did you know you can save your analysis?

I have recently received feedback from users that they did not know that it was possible to save their analysis. The advantage of saving your analysis is not having to retrace your steps when you want to replicate the analysis on a future date. The good news is that you can save your analysis plus so much more using the Insights application.

1 - Perform the intended analysis in your Analytics Hub;

2 - Navigate to the right of the screen and click on your lightbulb “call-to-action” button to generate an Insight and effectively save your analysis;

3 - Click on “Create” and once generated give the Insight a name;



 4 - View your saved analysis by navigating to your Insights Hub and viewing the newly created tile;

5 - Then reconstitute your analysis by clicking on the desired Insight tile and clicking on the “View Viz” button;

Data refresh

Hospitals who are subscribed to Package C have their latest data; available to February 2019.

Clinically appropriate waiting times

The next Australian federal election will be held on Saturday 18 May 2019. The debate about access to healthcare and clinically appropriate waiting times is ramping up between the major parties.

On one hand, the incumbent government is promising $165M in funding towards regional Australia initiatives and a specialist cystic fibrosis specialist unit at Sydney’s Westmead hospital. And on the other hand, the opposition has a plan to increase funding in cancer to the region of $2.3B. Click here to learn more!

Emerging from the discussions is the need for hospitals to be able to deliver clinically appropriate waiting times. We are seeing increasing concern from professional Australian clinical bodies that hospital services are stretched to the limits. "Increasing demand, increasing population, increasing complexity of illness has put enormous pressure that's not being funded enough,". 

An added complexity is setting the right balance between planned and emergency care capacity. In recent days another news report surfaced (click here) concerning access times for patients who present at an emergency department in New South Wales. 

Using INSIGHTS you are able to find out how your performing against your National Emergency Access Target (NEAT). Our Australian members tend to explore the indicator “Percentage of ED departures within 4 hours” and NZ members tend to explore the “Percentage of ED departures within 6 hours”.

1 - Observe your result against the Health Roundtable population for the last 12 months in the executive summary



2 - Click on the indicator label to enter the drilldown module

3 - Select your comparators in overview chart


 4 - Select the time period of interest in the time series chart


 5 - Swap out Codename as the first row heading for Urgency Disposition Group (UDG)

In the case of these three codenames, there is a relatively high volume of presentations who are classed as “Non-Admitted - Triage 2”. These are patients who present to ED who are considered an emergency and require attention within 10 minutes. However, they are also classed as not requiring admission to a hospital bed, which might be an interesting cohort to audit  understand the patient pathways that are 1) dragging down the performance against NEAT and 2) opportunities for collaboration with partners in the community to provide alternative care settings to manage these patients.

Right balancing elective and non-elective activity is also a significant challenge as converting too much of your elective capacity to non-elective on adhoc basis can prove damaging to your elective waiting lists. 

For the same three codenames, we observed a shift in activity from emergency to planned between the 2017 and 2018 calendar years. 

Article Links: 
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/health-again-focus-as-campaign-resumes
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-26/nsw-hospital-emergency-patient-survey-results/11047102

Please contact Jovin Synott (jovin.synott@healthroundtable.org) the INSIGHTS Product Manager if you have any questions about our observations and if you’d like any support with your INSIGHTS use-cases.