Preventive Health SA partnered with Notitia to develop a pilot analytics solution that enabled deeper analysis of mental health-related emergency department presentations while building internal capability within the Epidemiology and Research team.
Data Analytics • Business Intelligence • Data Engineering • Training & Capability Building
Preventive Health SA partnered with Notitia to develop a pilot analytics solution that enabled deeper analysis of mental health-related emergency department presentations while building internal capability within the Epidemiology and Research team.
Data Analytics • Business Intelligence • Data Engineering • Training & Capability Building
Led by the Epidemiology and Research Division, Preventive Health SA sought to better understand mental health-related emergency department presentations while building the capability to leverage modern analytics tools and data assets.
Preventive Health SA aimed to gain a clearer understanding of health presentations among young people and examine how these differ across various demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic groups.
At the same time, Preventive Health SA recognised the opportunity to strengthen internal analytics capability, ensuring the team could continue developing and applying data-driven insights into the future.
Preventive Health SA needed more than a dashboard. They required a repeatable solution that would demonstrate the capabilities of the new analytics ecosystem and lay the foundation for future analytical work.
Notitia worked closely with Preventive Health SA to design and deliver a pilot analytics solution.
The solution leveraged validated emergency department data already available through SA Health's Data and Analytics Platform Collaboration Zone (DAP Zone), reducing duplication and ensuring consistency with existing governance and reporting standards.
To support meaningful analysis, Notitia enriched the emergency department dataset with additional reference information including:
• Mental health diagnosis groupings
• Demographic distributions
• Remoteness indicators
• Geographic classifications
• Socioeconomic patterns
To provide a more complete picture of mental health-related emergency department activity, Notitia combined clinical data with demographic, geographic, remoteness and socioeconomic indicators. This enabled users to explore patterns and trends through multiple lenses and better understand variation across communities and regions.
This curated analytics dataset was hosted on Snowflake, then exposed through Denodo (a data management platform that specialises in data virtualisation) and consumed within Microsoft Power BI, creating an interactive reporting experience that allowed users to explore trends, demographic patterns and regional variation.
The pilot dashboard included:
• Statewide benchmarking across health regions
• Trend analysis over time
• Geographic mapping and hotspot identification
• Population-adjusted reporting
• Interactive filtering and drill-down capabilities
• Mental health diagnosis categorisation
• Demographic and equity analysis
Through interactive visualisations, filtering and drill-down capabilities, users can move beyond static reporting to explore trends, demographic patterns and geographic variation in greater detail.
Recognising that long-term success depended on internal capability, Notitia also delivered comprehensive technical documentation and hands-on training covering Snowflake and modern analytics development practices.
The project was designed not only to answer immediate business questions, but also to establish a reusable and scalable analytics framework that could support future reporting, analytical exploration and capability development across Preventive Health SA.
The project delivered a governed and reusable analytics solution that enables Preventive Health SA to analyse mental health-related emergency department activity across multiple dimensions from a single reporting environment.
By combining governed emergency department data with clinical, demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic indicators, the solution provides deeper visibility into presentation patterns across South Australia, helping to inform population health planning, analysis, and decision-making.
Key outcomes included:
• A production-ready pilot analytics dashboard
• A reusable reporting dataset built on governed data sources
• Integration of geographic, remoteness and socioeconomic indicators
• Population-adjusted reporting capabilities
• Comprehensive technical documentation
• Knowledge transfer and capability uplift for the Epidemiology and Research team
• A repeatable analytics framework for future reporting initiatives
Importantly, the project demonstrated how data and analytics can be translated into practical analytical products that support evidence-based decision-making, address immediate reporting needs and build sustainable analytical capability within a public health organisation.
“One of the reasons that we chose Notitia was that they really aligned with our core values. A really important part of choosing a vendor, for us, was making sure that we had someone that we could work really well with and understand what we were trying to do."
Preventive Health SA is responsible for improving the health and wellbeing of South Australians through targeting preventable risk factors, research and policy development. Access to timely, reliable data plays a critical role in helping the agency understand population health trends.
Through its Epidemiology and Research Division, Preventive Health SA supports evidence-based decision-making by analysing population health trends and identifying opportunities to improve health outcomes across South Australia.
Dr Jason Bennie, Director of Epidemiology and Research at Preventive Health SA, with Guilherme Matte, Notitia’s Adelaide-based Senior Analytics Consultant
