What we offer

Subject matter expertise

The sample projects on this site show our wide-ranging subject matter expertise in health and aged care.

Expertise in the Australian health and aged care system and international systems

Our consultants have direct experience in managing and leading health reform, programs and health and aged care services within Australia and internationally.

Methodological expertise

We have expertise in a wide range of study/evaluation designs, data collection approaches, analytical methods, and methods for synthesising evidence from disparate sources.

Transparency

With our methodological rigour, our findings can always be traced to the evidence, reducing biases in the recommendations we make.

Listening to stakeholders and co-designing solutions

We seek to understand how stakeholders are affected by a project and identify ways to hear their voices and involve them in achieving project outcomes.

Cultural sensitivity and responsiveness

We adopt culturally responsive and sensitive practices in all aspects of our work.

High-quality outcomes

Our genuine interest in the work that we do contributes to our “going the extra mile” to produce high-quality outcomes.

Publication-ready reports and other communications

We understand that the success of our work is in how we communicate it, to our clients as well as the broader audiences that our client wish to share the work with. Our reports are well written and visually appealing, highlighting take-home messages for easy absorption.

Evaluation

We have evaluated high-profile, multi-stakeholder, complex programs in health and aged care, mostly involving mixed-methods. We are skilled in all aspects of evaluation, including design, program logic/theory, data collection design, case studies, statistical and economic analysis, working with secondary data, report writing and dissemination. We are experienced in experimental, quasi-experimental, non-experimental, qualitative, realist and participatory/action research approaches.

Planning, needs analysis and projections

We have supported federal, state and territory governments in developing methods and tools for estimating relative utilisation of health services or need at sub-national/regional levels, forecasting need or demand for hospital and other health services and modelling health workforce requirements. We equip our clients with tools to undertake their own further analyses and provide training to build expertise and capability.

Workforce planning, review and modelling

We have undertaken numerous projects planning, reviewing and modelling health workforce requirements. These have been across a range of workforces and for specific workforces. We have used needs-based approaches to model workforce needs in addition to the traditional demand-based approaches. Members of our team have been responsible for workforce planning functions in national agencies and established major health workforce data collections that continue to be used.

Analytics

We have capabilities in modern approaches for modelling causation, Bayesian analysis, models for clustered data, and machine learning/ predictive analytics. We regularly work with state and Commonwealth statutory and administrative data collections, population surveys, registries, financial data, electronic health records, and linked data. We use R for statistical analyses and developing tools to manipulate, explore and visualize data. We share underlying code for analysis and tools with our clients and have trained staff in government organisations to refresh analyses or maintain tools that we deliver.

Classification

We developed the Australian Emergency Care Classification and were part of the team that developed the original Service Related Groups (SRGs) and Enhanced Service Related Groups (ESRGs), which we have continued to refine. We also developed the concept of hospital peer groups. We have worked on enhancements to the Australian Refined Diagnosis Related Groups (AR-DRGs) classification and refined it for international health systems. Internationally we have developed classification systems for  dental and outpatient care. We combine high-end statistical skills, proficiency in clinical coding, clinical and health system knowledge and an understanding of the principles and functions of classification systems.

Costing and pricing

We have carried out many costing studies at national, sub-national, and health service/hospital levels, and for specific services such as dialysis, interventional neuroradiology and cardiothoracic surgery.

Funding policy and models

We have played a key and significant role in developing activity based funding within Australia and internationally. We have worked on the design side and the implementation side. We have worked in service areas where ABF has been more commonly applied, such as hospital services, as well as new areas, such as aged care, breast screening and ambulance services.

Evidence reviews

We undertake systematic and rapid evidence reviews as part of many of our projects and as stand-alone projects. We apply industry standards for framing questions, identifying publications, assessing the quality of studies, summarising the evidence (including meta-analysis), interpreting the findings and reporting.

Safety and quality

We have developed and analysed clinical indicators, developed reports and visualisations of safety and quality measures (including outcomes), advised on and implemented statistical methods for risk adjustment, and explored evidence of interventions and policies to improve safety and quality. We developed the inaugural chartbooks of safety and quality measures for the Australian Council for Safety and Quality (2004) and for the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission (2007).

Health outcome and performance reporting

Jim Pearse was involved in the development of the original National Health Performance Framework (2001), which continues to be used for reporting on health outcomes and the performance of the health care system in the AIHW’s Australia’s health. He also developed the framework for performance reporting under the Australian Health Care Agreements (2006). We developed the inaugural reports on health outcomes, health system performance and broader determinants of health, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework Report (2006) and the State of Our Public Hospitals Report (2004). We have also explored evidence of the impact of performance reporting.

Policy and strategy

We have strong credentials in health and aged care policy, with a particular focus on complex health systems. Our policy expertise covers all areas of health care: primary health care, chronic disease, integrated care, the hospital sector, preventative health, health care funding and aged care.

Data and information management

We have reviewed organisations’ information flows and advised on the best methods for managing information. We have developed specifications for data sets and individual data elements and have represented these in the AIHW’s Metadata Online Registry, METEOR. We have an understanding and appreciation of ethical and legal issues in procuring, transferring, storing and disseminating data and advise our clients on the key frameworks relevant to these areas.

Quality is central to everything we do

We operate under internationally recognised standards, including the ANS/NZ ISO 9001:2015 quality standard (for which we are accredited), the Australian Standard for Risk Management, AS/NZS 31000:2009 and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) project management standard.

For our writing, we follow the Australian Government Style manual, unless our client wishes to use a different convention. We go to great lengths to proofread our work to minimise typographical errors and maintain a professional look and feel of our documents.

We follow the tidyverse style guide (https://style.tidyverse.org/) for writing script and manipulating, exploring and visualising data. For most data analysis we use RStudio Workbench, an integrated development environment (IDE) for R (www.rstudio.com). For data visualisation and sharing analysis results with our clients we use RStudio Connect. We use Shiny and other applications for developing interactive data visualizations. For big data we use Databricks (https://databricks.com), a platform for complex data analysis and data science workflows based on Apache Spark (https://spark.apache.org/).

We regularly review our systems to continuously improve our services and outcomes.

We aim to deliver the highest quality services, helping our clients to achieve their objectives, while transferring our expertise and building their capabilities.