About

A leading state government health department is responsible for safeguarding the health and wellbeing of millions of residents through policy, program delivery, and partnerships with public and private healthcare providers. The department oversees critical portfolios such as hospital and ambulance services, mental health, and aged care. During and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, it has focused on improving service efficiency, patient outcomes, and system-wide transparency through data-driven decision-making and continuous digital transformation.

Challenge

The department’s Health Analytics team required a centralised Power BI dashboard to monitor patients enrolled in a chronic care initiative designed to reduce avoidable hospital admissions.

The primary challenge was bringing together multiple datasets, each with different structures, refresh schedules, and levels of data quality, to create a unified, accurate, and timely view of enrolled patient activity.

The objectives included providing insights into:

  • Total, average, and monthly number of enrolled patients

  • Patient exclusions, deaths, and funding conversions

  • Capitation funding utilisation

  • Inpatient activity and funding consumption

  • Average length of stay (ALOS), emergency presentations, non-admitted episodes, and separations

  • Enrolment duration and program engagement over time

The solution needed to be secure, scalable, and easily accessible to both departmental analysts and external health service partners.

Solution

Leveraging extensive experience in healthcare data architecture and Power BI implementation, AGER BI designed and deployed an enterprise-grade analytics solution within a short timeframe.

Using Power Query and Dataflows, the solution ingested and transformed data from multiple departmental systems including:

  • The Admitted Episodes Dataset

  • The Emergency Minimum Dataset

  • The Non-Admitted Health Dataset

Through a robust semantic model, data was harmonised and optimised for analysis using star schema modelling principles. This enabled consistent and efficient reporting across patient, service, and funding dimensions.

Advanced DAX measures were developed to automate complex logic such as patient eligibility, exclusion handling, funding conversion to National Weighted Activity Units (NWAU), and ALOS calculations.
The Power BI dashboards were built with row-level security (RLS), ensuring sensitive health data could be safely shared across internal and external stakeholders through Power BI Premium capacity.

Additional Power BI capabilities used included:

  • Forecasting and trend analysis to predict enrolment and care outcomes

  • Drill-through pages for patient-level analysis

  • Bookmarks and dynamic visuals to switch between funding, activity, and demographic views

  • Automated refresh pipelines to ensure near-real-time reporting

Benefits

The completed Power BI solution delivered a single source of truth for patient enrolment and care activity across multiple health services.
Key outcomes included:

  • Faster decision-making: Teams could identify patients at risk of extended stays or readmission and act proactively.

  • Operational efficiency: Improved visibility into funding utilisation helped optimise program costs and resource allocation.

  • Enhanced collaboration: Secure data access allowed both the department and health services to monitor shared outcomes in real time.

  • Predictive insights: Built-in forecasting models provided data-driven guidance on patient flow and program capacity planning.

By using Power BI’s scalable architecture and automation capabilities, the department can now make evidence-based decisions that directly improve patient care, reduce avoidable hospital admissions, and deliver measurable financial savings across the health network.