HGS Win InfoSol 2024 Award

Health Geographics has won the prestigious InfoSol 2024 Award for the Best Business Dashboard 2024, for its Private Health Care Australia Dash App.

Paul Grill, the CEO of Infosol personally congratulated HGS and its CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan on the achievement which has previously been won by major international marketing companies such as Salesforce.

Paul said: “Congratulations to you and your team for an outstanding presentation and submission. The Best Business Dashboard represents the best business use case and result and the judges really liked your use of the cube.”

The nine-cell Cube was developed by Dr McMullan to explain the profiles of more than 14 million Australians with private health insurance. It shows increasing per capita membership of health care funds on one axis and increase benefits paid per member on the other axis.

Dr McMullan said: “Some demographics on the Cube have very high levels of private health insurance, but draw very little in benefits per member, while others have relatively low levels of insurance, but rely heavily on benefits provided by health insurance, due to chronic illness.

“We used the Cube as a consistent measure across both the Dashboard and the associated Map, as it explains not just the importance of demographic profiles of PHA members, but also the significance of where they live for policy makers and politicians.”

Health Geographics is a sister company of Education Geographics, which won the InfoSol 2023 Award for the Most Valuable Dashboard.

EGS and HGS were established, using the knowledge base developed by their parent company Australian Development Strategies over 50 years of profiling spatial data on political, demographic and economic trends across Australia.

Former Australian Senator and ADS Founder John Black congratulated the HGS team on the new interactive dashboard design and its associated online Esri map.

Mr Black said: “As a former Australian Senator, I know how hard it can be to access National Cabinet Ministers and to hold their attention for more than 30 seconds when you do.

“So, when Private Healthcare Australia asked us to help, we looked at it from the point of view of the person on the other side of the desk, the Cabinet Minister, who wants to know who pays and who benefits.

“We worked with our stats team to break down and model a huge wall of data from the health bureaucracy into two dependent variables: the percentage of persons with health insurance and the benefits per member.

“Our Health Geographics CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan then designed an innovative multi-dimensional cube, tracking who pays on one axis and who benefits on the other and describing each coloured and numbered cell with its own key political stereotype which was displayed on a map of Australian electorates.

“Our award-winning designer Reg Kernke linked the stereotypes to an Infosol Dashboard which summarised each cell in the Cube in both words and tables.

“In a series of moving dials for each Australian electorate, the dashboard goes on to show health indicators – along with the numbers of swinging voters and how they voted last election.

“The dashboard does a deep dive into the demographics of each cell on the cube and links that with our national database with a thousand variables across 50 detailed interactive charts and tables of the top seats.

“And finally, the Cabinet Minister could zoom in on our national ESRI map to find their own electorate and see how it scored on the key economic, demographic and political drivers.”

The CEO of Private Healthcare Australia Dr Rachel David congratulated Health Geographics and Dr McMullan.

“Private Healthcare Australia (PHA) engaged Health Geographics to develop and design a dashboard (demographic mapping tool) to assist with its engagement and policy advocacy with the Australian Government, and to support member health funds better understand the changing demographics of private health insurance members and how best to address the needs of their customers.

“Health Geographics developed an accessible, easy to use visual asset which provides a demographic analysis, profiling and mapping of PHI membership across Australia and mapped data from PHA, Australian Bureau of Statistics, including the latest census data to specific federal electorates, including information on age, profession, cultural background and income bands which provides an insight into what members are expecting of both private health insurers and government.

“PHA is working with the Australian Government to ensure the private health system is fit for purpose, the participation levers for private insurance are appropriately targeted and the needs of the Australian public are met now and into the future.

“In 2023, Health Geographics updated the dashboard with the latest demographic data and electorate mapping to ensure it is current and effective. The upgrade included providing secure access to member health funds for use in research, evaluating, delivering and designing better quality products and services, and developing pro-consumer policy.