Client:

Western Australia Mental Health Commission

Deliverable:

Online tailored data collection systems developed, hosted and supported for preparation of National Minimum Data Set (MDS) submission

Problem:

One of Western Australian Mental Health Commission’s (MHC) roles is the collection and validation of mental health data sets from organisations across the state and the subsequent submission to the Commonwealth.

Historically this had been carried out by collecting spreadsheets of data from organisations. This was, time consuming, prone to error and had limited capacity to constrain the answers organisations could provide or to validate their responses during collection.

Solution:

WebSurvey undertook the development, testing, implementation and hosting of an online data tool that collects data for the annual submission of the mental health data sets.

The MHC was confident in our capabilities at WebSurvey due to our experience in other similar projects within health, which meant we had the IT infrastructure, depth of experienced personnel and experience working to tight timeframes that was required for this project.

The tool includes a number of levels of access and authorisation, including state, regional and organisational access, as well as complex validation to ensure the content of the data collected is valid prior to its submission.

The MHC requires regular updates, enhancements and modifications to the administration site, functionality, and data validation. WebSurvey works closely with the MHC during the enhancements to ensure the solution is delivered to specification and on time.

Outcome:

Since its initial implementation, the system has been enhanced to include more detailed validation functions, which have further reduced the reporting burden for both the WA Mental Health Commission and the organisation using the system.

The implementation of this data collection tool has had an exceptional impact on the timeframe with significant reduction in the time required for

• the collection and validation of data between the MHC and organisations
• the acceptance of the national submission as a result of fewer issues being raised due to the quality of the data being collected improving.

The whole process now takes approximately one quarter of the time it took prior, enabling MHC WA to meet its dataset commitments to the Commonwealth in a prompt manner.

Client feedback:

"Firstly, just to give you a bit of feedback - the data collection run has gone very well. Our compliance has increased and we have had fewer questions about system use (in fact I am struggling to think of any apart from very minor issues). Congratulations to all the team."

Trevor Dare Manager Information Development Mental Health Commission