East Health Trust PHO Paves the Way for Data-Driven Healthcare in New Zealand

In recent years, New Zealand’s traditionally fragmented healthcare system has moved to a centralized model and a strategy designed to deliver high-quality care when people need it. This approach supports the achievement of government-mandated health targets for faster cancer treatment, improved  immunization, shorter stays in emergency departments, and shorter wait times for first specialist assessment as well as elective treatment.

A new National Data Platform deployed by Health New Zealand is integral to this transformation. The platform, based on Snowflake, consolidates a large number of key national data sets into a single environment. 

Adoption of the platform presents an opportunity for the 30 primary healthcare organizations (PHOs) that report performance back to Health New Zealand to access data sets and rich services that can transform their own service delivery capabilities. 

East Health Trust PHO elected to seize the opportunity to modernize its legacy data architecture, with the aim of incorporating additional data sets in the future to achieve a comprehensive view of the health of an enrolled population of about 122,000 in the East Auckland and Franklin regions.  

Incorporated under the Charitable Health Trusts Act in June 2003, East Health Trust PHO supports a network of healthcare providers that includes GPs, nurses, nurse practitioners and other health professionals. The PHO contracts with 19 teams comprising approximately 250 clinicians.  East Health Trust PHO, along with other health agencies, needs to manage challenges that include shortages of skilled clinical personnel and an aging population, as well as diverse and complex population health needs. Overcoming these obstacles requires the effective deployment of new technologies within constrained budgets. 

The organization had been a leader in data management among New Zealand PHOs, having deployed a data warehouse to an on-premises server in 2013. However, the processes required to capture and leverage data from practice management systems used by the general practices in its network were time-consuming. The complexity of the task was exacerbated by the fact that each GP clinic used one of up to six vendor-provided systems, each of which was regularly updated or changed. Reliability, scalability and security are enhanced with Snowflake, while reducing the effort required from East Health Trust PHO to maintain the server.  

East Health Trust PHO established its requirement as delivering a standardized view of data for all its clinics and clinicians, and to proactively determine the region’s healthcare needs with no patient falling “between the cracks.” The PHO also had to refine workforce utilization and development to better meet the needs of patients with complex health needs who required health coaches or specialist practitioners.   

Further, to receive performance-based funding from Health New Zealand, East Health Trust PHO is required to report back on system-level measures (health targets). This is in addition to the New Zealand health funding system of capitation (per-head payment per enrolled patient), with allocations determined by patient demographics.  

East Health Trust PHO turned to trusted advisers Cognizant to recommend a solution and was aware of the synergies that the Snowflake AI Data Cloud could deliver as Health New Zealand was already implementing Snowflake for the National Data Platform. In addition, Coalesce, the tool East Health Trust PHO selected to automate data transformation, had been specifically developed for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud. “The Snowflake AI Data Cloud was the right solution for us to future-proof our data warehousing and infrastructure and, because it was a cloud-based solution, delivered the security and scalability we needed,” said Jody Janssen, Senior Business Analyst, East Health Trust PHO.  

Also, because the Snowflake AI Data Cloud supports the common, standardized version of SQL for querying, the East Health Trust PHO’s analysts could easily adapt to Snowflake’s requirements. The cloud environment reduced the time, effort and cost of maintenance of legacy infrastructure, enabling the lean technology team to focus on higher-value priorities.  

The organization formally selected the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and by mid-2024 was running the product parallel with its on-premises data warehouse ahead of the transition. As early adopters of the new technologies, East Health Trust PHO’s migration will be instrumental in paving the way for others.    

“Today, with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, we have a cloud warehouse in which we can validate, transform and standardize our data so our clinicians, pharmacists, finance team members and others can quickly and easily gain access to business intelligence  reports,” said Janssen.   

“We are now using the Medicly Eightwire data exchange to bring data directly from the practice management systems used by GPs into Snowflake,” she added. “We have also integrated an on-premises version of Qlik Sense to manage analytics and deliver insights, and Coalesce to manage data transformation.”

With the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, East Health Trust PHO has completed the primary work of future-proofing its data warehouse, infrastructure and toolsets. The data warehouse operates with near-100% availability, while queries run considerably faster against the organization’s datasets.

With full cutover to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud expected before 2025, East Health Trust PHO is looking forward to enjoying the benefits and efficiencies gained from reducing the time to complete some data processing jobs that took most of a day to an hour. 

East Health Trust PHO is now poised to elevate its data and insights through data shares with repositories such as the New Zealand Aotearoa Immunization Register and the National Cervical Screening Register. It further plans to enable the Auckland and Northland regional collaborative (Health Safe) to connect directly to its Snowflake AI Data Cloud to assist with public health collaborations, replacing the current highly manual process. More broadly, the organization is looking to integrate census and socio-economic data to gain a deeper understanding of the East Auckland and Franklin regions’ populations and its health characteristics. 

“Securely accessing Health New Zealand datasets is going to make our life much easier as exchanging files manually has been incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming,” said Janssen. “We can now confidently set some definite goals as to what we can achieve with data through the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.”