Unlocking intelligence from population health data

From patient charts to medical records, health services across the world have been collecting a wealth of information for decades.

While this data contains immense value for insights, the sheer volume generated presented a challenge for traditional analysis methods – posing as a potential barrier to healthcare providers leveraging this trove of knowledge.

Civica’s Head of Solution Strategy, John Doran, said he believed in the power of software tools to unlock intelligence in data by automatically extracting insights, rather than have users “manually comb through dashboards”.

“We are able to identify opportunities by bringing together data from across systems to produce new data-driven insights that provide opportunities for innovative solutions to challenges or previously unseen opportunities for improvement,” he said.   

Across a range of government and public sector areas, including libraries and hospitals, Civica specialised in building and customising software to help public agencies deliver critical services. In the health sector, Civica’s products ranged from clinical systems, workforce management, to financial management, he said.

This allowed Civica to understand the breadth of activities and datasets available within organisations, as well as the challenges faced in those areas.

“The key to unlocking the value of the data that has been collected over decades are tools that extract insights and intelligence while retaining its granularity and richness,” he added.

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Preserving each grain of data

As part of a national project with Ministry of Health (MOH), Civica employed its CostMaster solution to aid the Ministry to better understand the resource needs of healthcare providers in treating patients across Singapore. 

By considering all the activities in a healthcare setting, Civica’s solution allowed users to access dynamic analytics and reporting for better insight into operations and finances, and build accurate patient level costing models.

Doran explained that traditionally, this type of analysis could only be done with summary data, which left variations within the data unknowable.

Summary data refers to aggregated information of a larger dataset often represented using descriptive statistics like mean, median or standard deviation.

Software tools like CostMaster captured this data at the transactional level for each patient interaction. 

More importantly, it allowed providers to access analytics down to each individual clinical interaction, where the level of detail of data meant subtle but important variation could now be identified. This unlocks new opportunities for insights and improvement that were not previously possible.

“Utilising this level of detail will allow the Ministry to gain a better understanding of variation in care delivery across Singapore and help them to then manage out that variation and work with the providers to better align to the Ministry’s strategic objectives,” Doran said.

Moving towards holistic data for healthcare

Eliminating unwarranted variation in a process was key to both improving its quality and efficiency, said Doran.

At the same time, he also recognised that healthcare delivery was a complex process where variation could no longer be identified through manual analysis.

To overcome this challenge, Doran said that data analysis must adopt a more holistic approach and integrate datasets that may have been considered less relevant in the past. Examples of these datasets could include patient outcomes, education, or even employment.

Similarly, Singapore’s recent Healthier SG strategy shifted the nation’s healthcare approach to a more holistic thinking with emphasis placed on preventative care and community support.

To this end, Civica was looking towards Aurum, its new artificial intelligence (AI)-based costing engine that was aimed at identifying systemic variation in clinical data.

“Aurum is a new solution we have created that is able to mine complex models of clinical activity, bringing together diagnoses, treatment, theatre, pharmacy, and many other datasets together, and extract where the systemic variation in care delivery is located,” John explained.

Citing its impact in the UK, Doran highlighted that Aurum has enabled hospitals to identify over a hundred million dollars’ worth of opportunity to generate efficiencies.

This was achieved by highlighting variation in clinical practices that was previously unknown because data was summarised and analysed manually.

“I believe this journey is still in its early stages, but by adopting this approach we have already seen successes in helping organisations realise their goals,” he added. 

Developments in data analytics

As the global economy become more digitised and mounds of data are collected in our daily routines, Doran said that “cloud computing” and “advanced analytics” will become more commonplace in the lexicons and processes of the workplace.

“We will continue to see adoption of tools such as Aurum that lower the barrier to harnessing the potential that comes with the step-change in processing capabilities,” he explained.

Generative AI (GenAI) will play a major role in this, he added, allowing people with the ideas, but maybe not the technical know-how, to create these solutions themselves. 

But it remains important for government agencies - regardless of this evolving landscape - to focus on their key objective of providing effective services to citizens.

“Our role as solution providers will continue to be to understand their goals and objectives and identify innovative opportunities to create tools that can help them to achieve those goals,” Doran concluded.

Civica’s Market Leader - Singapore Central Functions, Stanimira Koleva, and Chen Yi, Assistant Director, Finance Division, Ministry of Health Holdings will be giving a presentation on the best practices for maximising data’s value in the public sector at GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation (FOI) 2025 in March. The session is on March 26, from 2.00pm – 2.20pm. You can find out more about FOI and register here >>>