Welcome

Hello and welcome to the 7th edition (September 2020) of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Reporting e-newsletter. This e-newsletter provides important updates about the Health Data Portal (the Portal) as well as a range of additional relevant, timely and important information related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health data and reporting.

Content

Item 1: July - August 2020: National Key Performance Indicators (nKPI), Online Service Reports (OSR) and Health Care Provider (HCP) Reporting Status Update

Item 2: Portal Support and Helpdesk

Item 3: The Portal: Continuous Improvement Activities

Item 4: QLIK: New nKPI Summary report feature coming soon

Item 5: nKPI Data Validation Scorecard

Item 6: QLIK Interactive Reports Training and User Support

Item 7: Forthcoming updates to some nKPIs

Item 1: July - August 2020 nKPI, OSR and HCP Reporting Status Update

The current nKPI, OSR and HCP number reporting period was extended by 14 days and closed on Sunday, 30 August 2020.

The Department of Health appreciates the strong commitment made by many health services to voluntarily submit their data assets this reporting period, despite this reporting round being non-mandatory.

Instead, reporting has been strongly encouraged due to the benefits for your health service, and the broader Closing the Gap agenda, that are achieved through data reporting. We expect that the changes in the nPKI, OSR or HCP data submitted may also provide a clear picture of the impacts of COVID-19 on services and service delivery for your health service and the broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.

During the reporting round:

220 of the 233 nKPI reporting health services submitted their data asset to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW);
207 of the 233 OSR reporting health services had submitted their data asset to the AIHW; and
111 of the 122 HCP reporting health services had submitted their data asset to the Department of Health.

Only 5 health services advised they would not submit reports for the reporting round.

The Northern Territory had the highest number of nKPI data assets (66) and OSR (68) submitted to the AIHW. New South Wales (NSW) is second highest for nKPI (48) and OSR (47). Queensland (QLD) is third highest for nKPI (38) and for OSR (28).

NSW and the Australian Capital Territory had the highest number of HCP number reports submitted to the Department of Health at 30, followed by QLD (23) and Western Australia with 16.

If your health service has any questions regarding the recent reporting round, please contact the Health Data Portal Support team at indigenousreporting@health.gov.au

Item 2: Portal Support and Helpdesk

User Support

A suite of user support resources are available to help you use the Portal including the QLIK Interactive Reports. User Support resources include:

Quick Reference Guides (QRG) (step-by-step guides) including a What's New, What 's Different QRG for the current reporting round
Screencasts (interactive e-learning for new staff to learn the basics of the Portal)
Portal How-to Videos

Helpdesk

You can contact the Portal Helpdesk on 1800 316 387 between 8.30am and 5.00pm (Canberra time) Monday to Friday (excluding Australian Capital Territory and national public holidays). The Portal Helpdesk provides support to assist heath services with Portal registration and set up, and is the first point of contact for more complex queries which are escalated to the Portal Support team for action.

You can also refer to the Portal How-to Videos and online User Support Resources in the first instance, and/or email indigenousreporting@health.gov.au with your query where possible. This will help to ensure that the Portal Support team is available for complex queries, and to assist new Portal users who may require more intensive support.

Indigenous Health Data Reporting Contacts

A list of data reporting contacts including the AIHW, is available via the Portal Contact Details in the Portal webpage or the Contact Us page in the Portal.

Item 3: The Portal: Continuous Improvement Activities

Over the last three years, the Portal team has worked closely with health services, clinical information system (CIS) vendors and the broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health community sector to design, develop and implement the Portal for nKPI, OSR and HCP data reporting. The end of the current reporting period marked the fourth successful reporting round using the Portal. The success of the Portal is largely due to the ongoing collaboration between the Department of Health, health services and other stakeholders during the last three years.

We are now at a stage of the Portal's development where we can look at how we can enhance and improve it with a particular focus on the QLIK data analytics functionality.

We are keen to know if, and how, QLIK is meeting the needs of health services. Therefore, two important activities will be conducted in the coming weeks and months to help us collect information to inform the QLIK enhancements. These are:

1. July-August 2020 Reporting in the Portal Feedback Survey: An invitation to participate in a short online survey was sent to every registered Portal user in each health service via email on Monday 14 September 2020. The aim of the Portal Feedback survey is to identify features of the Portal and Qlik reports that are working well, and where improvements can be made. The survey should only take 5 - 10 minutes maximum to complete and is voluntary, and is due 2 October 2020.

2. QLIK Continuous Improvement Design Sessions - December 2020: These sessions will be open to all health services and conducted via Webex (an online videoconferencing / meeting application) in December 2020. The aim is to identify features of the QLIK Interactive Reports that are providing value to health services, and how the QLIK Interactive Reports could be improved. The sessions also provide an opportunity for health services to share their insights on how they are using QLIK, and the benefits they are realising through the Interactive Reports, with each other.

More information about these activities, including how you can participate, will be communicated to all health services via email in the coming weeks.

Item 4: QLIK: New nKPI Summary Report feature coming soon

In the coming months, a new feature will be available through QLIK that will enable health services to download from Qlik into PowerPoint the content of their nKPI summary reports. Using the finalised processed nKPI data, the PowerPoint export will replace the previous AIHW PowerPoint pack for health services, while the complete set of Qlik reports is replacing the current service level reports that the AIHW provide at the completion of each reporting period. Health services will be able to customise the design and content of their PowerPoint report to suit their own internal reporting and continuous quality improvement purposes. The Department of Health and Funding Agreement Managers (Department of Social Services) will continue to access final processed nKPI data through customised QLIK reports.

Training in QLIK will be conducted in the near future. More information about QLIK training will be communicated to health services in the coming weeks.

Item 5: nKPI Data Validation Scorecard

To ensure the data which health services submit to the Portal does not contain errors introduced by CIS software changes, the Department of Health has been conducting regular, independent checking of the report data produced by each CIS, and working with each vendor to address any issues. This data validation occurs at least every twelve months, and is repeated whenever vendors introduce major updates to their core systems or their reporting tools.

Currently, nKPI data validation is conducted for the Department of Health by NPS MedicineWise. This results in a report to the Department and a summary vendor ‘scorecard’ which you can access here: https://www.nps.org.au/nkpi.

Item 6: QLIK Interactive Reports Training and User Support

With the July/August 2020 nKPI, OSR and HCP reporting round over, Health Services may wish to start looking at their QLIK Interactive Reports to analyse their data trends and compare their latest results to those of other Health Services.

To ensure all health services can get the most out of their QLIK reports, a range of online user support resources are available. In addition, the Portal Support team will be been offering video-link training sessions using Webex throughout October 2020.

If you would like to attend a session, please email the Portal Support team at indigenousreporting@health.gov.au. We will then provide you with the video-link details for a session.

If you have any questions regarding the QLIK Interactive Reports, please email the Portal Support team at: indigenousreporting@health.gov.au

Item 7: Forthcoming updates to some nKPIs

The Feb 2020 AIHW review of the nKPI and OSR collections recommended updating a number of the existing nKPIs, in most cases to bring them in line with current clinical guidelines. Following the Review, an implementation roadmap was developed. Activity is now underway through a clinical and technical working group of the Health Services Data Advisory Group (HS DAG) to progressively work through these recommendations. Implementation of the updates will take place gradually, over several reporting periods. The first group of minor updates, involving indicators 3, 7, 8, 14 and 22, will be in place in clinical system reports and in the Health Data Portal in time for the December 2020 nKPI collection.

More details will be provided in the October newsletter about the first group of nKPI updates.

The changes for December 2020 include updates to indicator 22 (Cervical screening), reflecting the transition from the two yearly Pap test to the five yearly HPV test. During this transition stage it should be noted that from December 2020, the two-year data will be excluded because women who were screened from 1 December 2017 to 30 June 2018 require a screen in five years rather than two years if their result is normal. This means that the two-year screening data should not be used to inform performance as over half of the data is inaccurate. The data on the proportion of women being screened within three and five years will be correct.

If you have any questions please email indigenousreporting@health.gov.au