Qlik: Notitia deploys Qlik to aid South Western Sydney's digital journey

As healthcare providers face demand for mental health and addiction services, South Western Sydney Primary Health Network (SWSPHN) adopted Qlik's cloud analytics technology to help overstretched providers manage demand.SWSPHN worked with Qlik Australian-owned consultancy group Notitia to implement cloud analytics technology.Data insights will be used by South Western Sydney doctors and clinicians "overwhelmed mental health services manage demand more efficiently".Following successful trials in mental health and addiction services, this technology will also be rolled out to 50 healthcare organisations.The need for the Qlik cloud analytics speaks to the core of what PHN's are funded for, which is primarily understand the local health needs within its respective catchments, commission health services and support for those commissioned services, SWSPHN digital health and data manager Nick McGhie explained to ARN.For SWSPHN big gap for a long time was feeding back information about service delivery and what was happening on the ground in these services, to the services themselves."We were kind of getting this one-way feed, if you will, of data for a while, and it was really placing a burden on the reviews that we do," he said. "Typically, every three to six months, we'll sit down with each service and have a conversation about how the service is going, who's visiting, what sort of outcomes we're seeing."For a long time, that was one-way, right and we [SWSPHN] could see the data, they [medical professionals] couldn't.McGhie noted an organisation like SWSPHN want on-the-ground, real-time, or as close to real-time, as possible with the right data sets.However, before Qlik, there was a big gap in making sure that data had "meaning and actually fed back into service delivery and service improvements", he explained.Alex Avery managing director of Notitia an Australia-owned consultancy told ARN, SWSPHN and the other 31 PHNs across Australia all face this common challenge."They don't originate or master any data themselves," he said. "They're always getting it from somewhere else, mental health facilities, government sources, GPs, and so on. Having a tool that glues all of that together...that's the critical thing."Avery explained that Qlik as a tool, especially in health, is that it blends disparate data and makes it usable in a way they want to "engage with"."That could be through a data product, a report, a dashboard whatever it might be," he said.As a consultant partner, Notitia customises the Qlik product."Qlik is prevalent in health, and that's why we use it," said Avery. "It's a really simple-to-understand tool that marries data together."That might sound basic, but most competing tools get caught up in the engineering-how the tool works, rather than just returning results."What we do for clients is blend data from lots of different systems into a cohesive, simple format they can use."Moving off on-premBefore it could do any of that, Avery explained that SWSPHN specifically had an on-premises environment of Qlik in the past, which was a good product pre-cloud, but now "cloud is here"."We did a migration for SWSPHN, which involved resetting everything, porting apps across, reconnecting things, getting it all working, testing, validation, training...all the usual tasks you'd expect," he said."The real value for SWSPHN is giving information back to its commissioned service providers."PHNs face a challenge," he said. "They ask for all this information from GPs and clinics, but they're often criticised because they don't give anything back."Having insights in return would be great for medical professionals, noted Avery."Moving to the cloud, from a technology perspective, has meant that if [SWSPHN] want to give access to their commissioned service providers, there's a very easy onboarding path for them," he said. "They just need to know an email address, fill out an onboarding form, and they can securely lock it down so that only that practice sees its own data."According to Avery PHNs are "effectively the content aggregator" and are able to provide that "unique comparison" for practitioners under their network.It's the difference between saying, here's the data and here's the data from an "anonymised peer group"."That may not sound like much, but if you're running a busy practice, you're always laser focused," said Avery. "Being able to look up and out is key, and PHNs are one of the few bodies that can provide that comparison uniquely due to their role in aggregating practice information."That has been well adopted, noted Avery, and cloud makes that process "infinitely easier" than trying to work with a legacy on-premise system.ChallengesFor Avery however the core challenge has been between the people who collect healthcare data and those who use it, while making sure the data is high quality, meaningful, and collected in a way that protects privacy and reduces risk."What happens is in a busy healthcare setting, entering information is a manual task," he said. "It's often an afterthought or just a compliance activity that people don't really care about. So quality isn't front of mind."They just want to tick the box and get on with the real task they're meant to be doing, which is fair enough."What Notitia try to do is use field builds that are system-generated."That way, they're not relying on someone to key in free text," said Avery. "It might happen automatically through a console."For example, if someone tabs to the next section, that action in the system represents that it's completed. That gives you a really good kind of system control."The other thing Notitia does when reviewing information is look for things like completeness and duplicates."We've got some clever scripts we write and review to handle that from a technology perspective," he said. "But the core of data quality comes from people and process not technology."So that's really a cultural and educational change more than anything else."To overcome this there's a few things that Notitia does. For example, it will build a quality dashboard that shows the quality of what's coming in and the quality of what's going out."Then, we'll share that with the people who actually create the information, because they're the ones who need to change behaviour," he said. "We'll run training with them, put together guides, and look to leadership within the organisation to [ask] who is responsible for data as an actual asset."Notitia will also ask a senior staff who are able to sign off on the data and for, "crudely", the person who's "head will be on the chopping block if it's wrong.""That kind of cultural change starts by us putting in those processes [of] identifying the senior people who are ultimately responsible," said Avery. "We also try to drive it from the bottom up by giving them the tools, but also from the top down, by having leadership [look] [at] [what's] actually important, and why it matters."This is to help people understand the context, he explained."It's not just a box-ticking activity, this actually impacts outcomes," said Avery. "I think closing the loop allows that messaging to stay consistent through technology as well."Busy clinical staff, who are highly educated, could be doing anything else but entering information, he explained."They don't normally see how their clinical knowledge and contextual understanding can be blended with the outputs," he said. "We try to do is give that information back to the people who are actually going to use it, the people on the ground."This stops the information from becoming just executive corporate board reporting, which is a bit separated from the day-to-day activities of the business."Instead, Avery noted Notitia try and "put it back into the hands of the people" who run the business or carry out the activities that keep it operational."In this way, they can see the data and understand its relevance," he said. "Think it's all about giving them access and visibility."Keeping it ISOOne of the biggest challenges for Avery and an organisation like SWSPHN is the clear responsibilities it has in holding information, particularly under the under the Australian Privacy Principles, and the Notifiable Data Breach Scheme."Our position is to minimise risk by asking, really critically, every time you capture information on the need for it to be identifiable," said Avery. "It matters that we have a unique ID and so on."From a technology perspective it's all the standard things making sure that things are secure, you've got multi-factor, that data doesn't leave Australia, that ideally all processing happens on cloud computing, nothing happens locally on the machine."The sensitive nature of information that PHNs have are also under very strict kind of compliance guidelines that have to be followed, including ISO quality standards and cybersecurity standards.According to SWSPHN's Macghie one of the key things that PHNs have been tasked with is working towards ISO 27001 certification by June 2026 which is a "massive undertaking"."Any MSP [managed service provider] that we work with is really key on that journey, because they need to be able to support, the controls that we're implementing, or even just supporting in a mitigation strategy that we can then document," he said."Even just something as simple as that just, you know, being available to talk through those complex issues."Extracting valueFor Macghie the main goal and priority for SWSPHN is extracting the most value from the platforms being utilised."Quite often, what will start the conversation is Alex [Avery] is he will give me a call and tell me about a feature for Qlik," he said. "I might have seen a pop-up for it but probably dismissed it and forgot to have a look at what features have been released."It's really great to have someone actually try and understand the context of your business and your workflows."McGhie said there's not too many other relationships that