recently tested positive and what their risk scores were.
“It highlighted to the director of Pacific Health, who could feed up to the Executive Leadership Team, what was being done by these Pacific hubs and providers. It was really helpful to be able to drill down in different ways, because the data my manager might want would not necessarily be the same as what the doctor on call that day would want to see. “Data is power so having this information readily available was extremely important during the pandemic,” says Tuipulotu.
The Māori and the Pacific Regional Coordination Hubs had direct
access to the dashboard. Data enabling an equity focus
Namoe Tuipulotu - Head of Pacific Intelligence & Insights, Te Whatu Ora, was working in the Pacific Regional Coordination Hub when she got involved in developing the dashboard. “It is really important that we have Pacific people developing these types of dashboards if they are meant to reflect and show what’s happening for Pacific communities,” she explains. Tuipulotu says the clinical risk score was particularly useful for identifying high risk patients and visualising who had been contacted or assessed within 24 and 48 hours. This information could be filtered by ethnicity and age group. “It enabled us to see whether we were serving our Pacific people appropriately,” she says. For example, a user could extract a list of high-risk Pacific patients who had tested positive in the last 24 hours. “In my experience if you can’t tell the clinicians who a particular patient is they may lose trust in the data, but we were able to get down to NHI (National Health Index) level data, allowing clinical teams at the hub to sense check whether or not the data was accurate, which really helped with data quality ,” Tuipulotu explains.
“Analytics is about shifting from counting widgets to starting to understand outcomes and how we can know we are truly making a difference for our patients.” Namoe Tuipulotu, Head of Pacific Intelligence & Insights,TeWhatu Ora - Health New Zealand
“Having the right data also makes your processes so much more efficient.” A scalable platform for the future
The NRHCC regional data store was originally hosted on-premise, but was shifted to the cloud as the amount of data coming in started to multiply, ultimately holding around four million Covid-19 test results.
Armstrong says this was “a real step change”.
“It was hard, but it really changed things for us in terms of scalability,” she explains. The Covid-19 Dashboard now has around 60 different pages and Armstrong describes it as “like a big web site, providing windows to multiple different data sets in a completely integrated way”. Data is key to the hea l th system’s planning to enable it to ‘catch-up’ on services and care that was unable to be delivered during lockdown.
HEALTHCARE ANALYTICS IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND | A HINZ SPECIAL REPORT | 5
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