In 2021, NSW became the first state in Australia to have a large-scale maternity data intelligence system. Known as QIDS MatIQ, the system provides essential insights about maternity care within NSW Health services.
What is QIDS MatIQ?
Data from all NSW public birthing facilities comes into the Clinical Excellence Commission’s QIDS MATIQ system. This allows healthcare workers and policy makers to get timely insights into trends in maternity care and patient outcomes.
Through the system, users can produce easy to interpret charts and dashboards with maternity data that extends back to January 2019. Trends and outcomes over time can be displayed by hospital or Local Health District (LHD) and compared with similar facilities.
QIDS MatIQ is led by the Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC), in collaboration with eHealth NSW as a technical and data management partner in the project.
Dr James Mackie, Director of Medical Patient Safety at the CEC said that by bringing data together from across the public health system, QIDS MatIQ can identify areas for improvement.
“QIDS MatIQ introduces benchmarks and lets different maternity services benefit from each other's expertise. It displays well-recognised, clinically important outcomes such as stillbirth, low Apgar scores, post-partum haemorrhage and perineal tears. It can also respond to emerging issues, most recently providing near real-time insights of COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy across NSW,” Dr Mackie said.
The team are engaging with LHDs to educate staff and support practice improvement projects using the data.
Converting the data to real-time
Currently, eHealth NSW staff manually coordinate a weekly data transfer to populate QIDS MatIQ.
In future, data will be extracted daily from the NSW Health Enterprise Data Lake. This will provide staff with an up-to-date view of maternity-related information within the existing QIDS MatIQ system.
”The Data Lake is the best long-term option for regular data extraction across the QIDS MatIQ system,” Dr Mackie said.
“The CEC team are grateful for the work of the many eHealth NSW staff who are supporting clinical quality and patient safety efforts by making the Data Lake transition happen.”
The transition from a manual extraction to the data lake is underway and will be completed in the second half of 2023.
