Healthmap for needs assessment and planning

Primary Health Networks (PHNs) can access extensive data from healthdirect's Healthmap. Central and Eastern Sydney PHN use Healthmap to inform their after hours needs assessments and service activity plans.

When carrying out their 2019 needs assessment, the team at Central and Eastern Sydney PHN (CESPHN) realised they lacked sufficient reliable information on the availability of health services in the after-hours period.

To supplement after hours ED presentation and triage category data from the MBS, PIP and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, CESPHN looked to the healthdirect Healthmap to determine which areas within their PHN made the most calls to the healthdirect helpline in after-hours periods.

The healthdirect Healthmap is a data visualisation tool for a range of Australian health data. It is designed to help health system planners, such as PHNs, research and support their service mapping and provision strategies.

Data from the National Health Services Directory, healthdirect helpline, after hours GP helpline and Pregnancy Birth and Baby helpline is regularly uploaded to Healthmap making it a useful tool for developing needs assessments and activity plans.

Generating data insights from the Healthmap

Karen Rosier, a data analyst in the Planning Team at CESPHN, was leading the search for more data to support the needs assessment project started familiarising herself with the healthdirect Healthmap.

“First we visualised calls to the healthdirect helpline for our PHN area and broke that down to postcode level. To understand longitudinal changes and seasonal differences, we looked at data for several years and by quarter,” says Karen.

CESPHN started with a good basic understanding of how the after hours GP helpline was being used from this information and then layered additional Healthmap capabilities to look at available health services:

• service overlays — under “Key health services” and “National Health Services Directory”
• boundary overlays — under “Health and community regions” and “Australian Bureau of Statistics regions”.

Using the key health services information as a base, they overlaid emergency departments and general practices.

Click here to view a larger version of the image below

“To highlight gaps in services in different time periods, we toggled through the days that services were open and used the PIP timeframes that are in the helpline data section,” said Karen.

“Once we were familiar with Healthmap’s features, we worked closely with our After Hours Team to determine what level of data they wanted for their activity planning.

“Because we were all new to it, we decided to only look at the nurse triage helpline data and keep it at the PHN level, not break it down to the postcode level.”

Data from the healthdirect after hours GP helpline was generated for all variables (original intention, final disposition, final outcome, patient guidelines) and demographics (age, gender and cultural background).

Pulling a useful report

Karen recommends pulling data directly from the Healthmap for each variable as it is less time-consuming than exporting from the “View” tab. Results can be viewed in a pop-up window or as a summary report in a new tab in your browser.

The report provides data by each PIP timeframe as well as by total time, years and by quarters. It can be viewed for separate time periods or for the whole after-hours period.

“It’s easy to copy and paste the report data into a simple table in Excel and run it through Power Query to unpivot everything,” Karen said.

“You can then use that data to create pivot tables in Excel or import it into other programs such as Power BI, which is what we did for our After Hours Team.”

Continuing usage for ongoing data comparison

CESPHN has now started to look at data at the postcode level, comparing healthdirect after hours GP helpline data with nurse triage helpline data.

“We noticed high call numbers from areas where the NHSD data showed us that there are fewer general practices open in the after-hours periods, which highlighted a possible face-to-face service gap for Sundays and public holidays,” Karen explained.

“We were also interested to see that callers with an original intention of attending ED aligned with areas with lower urgent emergency department presentations.”

CESPHN finds that Healthmap is a useful planning tool and are impressed that it easily:

• modifies colours, borders, marker types and opacity for data sets
• handles multiple boundary sets (e.g. PHN, SA2, SA3, local health networks, aged care planning regions)
• layers data sets
• exports data and shares maps.

Watch the webinar about the after hours GP helpline and mapping and planning for the after hours period using Healthmap.