Data Skills
Data Skills
ON THIS PAGE you will find two data skills case studies.
This scenario might be different to your organisation or context, but are based on our research with sexual and reproductive health practitioners and offer insight into what data skills can look like in practice.
What’s the problem?
During a meeting of the board, steering group and executive of Sexual Health Organisation (SHO), the leadership team discuss the importance of using data to understand the needs of their community, as well as to highlight service trends. Available data sets include epidemiological data from surveillance systems, organisational data from patient intake forms, website traffic and social media posts, and publicly available data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
However, the leaders are concerned that this data is not well accessed or understood across the whole organisation, including the clinical and health promotion teams.
What’s the solution?
I know that most of my [health promotion outreach staff] won’t have any idea what I’m talking about [re: data collection] but I think it would really add a lot of quality to what we do if they did […] wouldn’t it be great if you could say confidently, “This is how [we] use their data, this is how [we] store it, this is the privacy policy, this is how we address confidentiality”.
(Expert interviews, Senior health promotion manager, DDCSRH)
What’s the problem?
Alex, a General Practitioner, has a new female patient in her late 30s seeking a comprehensive sexual health screening.
The patient, Sophie, is married but non-monogamous, and frequently attends swinger’s parties. She is asymptomatic, but is requesting additional testing as well as a standard screening – including pharyngeal and anorectal swabs. Relevant STI management guidelines suggest that because Sophie has multiple sexual partners and engage in anal sex, she is eligible for additional testing.
However, when Alex tries to process the cost of testing, the Medicare billing system flags that Sophie has already received a full screening and follow up in the past 12 months. This means that Alex cannot bulk-bill these additional tests.
What’s the solution?
To work around this barrier, Alex indicates on the Medicare system that Sophie was symptomatic. This ‘cheat’ means the tests can be processed through Medicare. Alex is concerned that the current ‘priority population’ categories are not fit for purpose.
Case study two is drawn from Caitlin Learmonth’s PhD project, you can find more information about the project here.
‘I feel like the idea of continuity of care being attached to really comprehensive medical records and data collection, it’s not a fantasy, but I think it’s kind of held up as this sort of goal and ideal within healthcare that that maybe is just not all that common in terms of how people actually access primary care services. So, I think I definitely see a kind of tension between those sorts of strategies like going to different providers and using different services and that data collection is kind of scattered by all of those practices, I think, speaks to much broader problems about healthcare’
(Policy Manager)
