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Case Studies

AHSA

This national Health Fund buying group made its data systems more governable.

Databricks and Power BI deliver a data system to health insurance body that’s unstoppable.
When AHSA needed to upgrade its Business Intelligence capacity to leverage its data lake.
Australian Health Services Alliance is Australia’s third biggest health purchasing entity, representing 27 independent Health Insurance funds across Australia, servicing 2.17M Australians. As a non-profit industry membership body, AHSA has handled contracting medical agreements, health data management, training and support services for its members for 20+ years. After transitioning from a dimensionally modelled data warehouse to a more modern data lake, AHSA sought to transform its data reporting and management capacities to take advantage of emerging technology, and called on PerData.
PerData implemented Databricks and PowerBI while establishing a managed services model.
PerData undertook a strong consultation phase before collaboratively designing a new system to meet future state needs across enormously complex data use cases. A new data collection system was built, better suited to episodic data and matching to benefits paid, with consistency established across datasets. A single tech stack was introduced in a manage service model to free organisational leaders up for strategic work. PerData used Databricks, prioritising the referential integrity required to combat the potential relative fragility of the data lake, designing a Data Model that preempts inner joins and any data breakages without any impact on production. Reporting was transformed by replacing legacy Cognos systems with PowerBI, enabling advanced reports with data visualisation, and staff were trained to extract sophisticated, usable reports.
To empower AHSA to govern and use its data for fraud detection and purchasing power.
AHSA now leverages its newfound data capabilities in powerful and transformative ways. Machine learning crawls data for fraud detection, and helps identify any poorly managed or incorrect charges—which helps AHSA drive performance improvement and system integrity amongst member services. Handling the private health information of over 2M Australians is a feature of the new system, with tight deletion protocols integrated, plus anonymised name and identifier encryption leveraged to maintain total identity protection even in worst-case hacking scenarios. The power of the new system’s best-practice ACID design (incorporating data Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) ensures a low-maintenance, high-usage, and highly flexibility data system for AHSA’s complex needs.
27
Member Health Funds
2.17M
Australians Covered
$2B
Benefits Paid Annually
Training

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