The healthcare industry is changing. This is due to both the changing demands of consumers and the introduction of digital technologies. Consumers are shifting towards a participative approach to care driven by easy access to information about health and medical care.

Organisations, which deliver health care, are adapting to these changes based on their experience. However, such experiences may not always be relevant, or indicative of the industry in general. Furthermore, decision makers are demanding an analytical focus on resolving business issues. Such analytics based problem-solving is possible because of the availability of “big data” due to cloud-based storage and accessibility. The technologies associated with data analytics are becoming increasingly user-friendly. Nevertheless, such data analytics are still not readily available, and where they are available, they come at a high cost.

Executives implementing healthcare transformation are seeking estimates of projected benefits from these changes. Such benefit calculations are not easy, because organisations providing health care are deemed to be a complex adaptive system, and their behaviours are difficult to predict. This is because even small perturbations caused by a minor change to the system could create unpredictable effects. Furthermore, healthcare organisations are required to balance multiple performance measures such as risks to patients, staff workload and costs. Decisions made to improve one measure may affect the others. A holistic approach to decision-making is, therefore, essential within healthcare.

Our solution platform uses a modularized architecture to provide decision support to healthcare executives and middle managers in their strategic, tactical and execution level decisions. Access to cloud technology, big data analytics and simulation capabilities have enabled the development of decision support systems to help healthcare organisations project the impact of proposed changes, and monitor and control such changes using data analytics.

We (AskA Consulting Group) have developed solutions, utilising our experiences from modern management practices and research carried out at The University of Queensland. Our solutions will provide remote-based decision support to healthcare executives around the world, and free up more of their time to focus on regulatory and administrative tasks during the transformation of the delivery of care services.