VPTAS Economic Modelling

Department of Health and Human Services (VIC)

Working with a governance and policy specialist firm (Cube Group) we developed a model to forecast demand for a Victorian Department of Health and Human Services subsidy scheme for patients travelling extended distances to access specialist health services.

The model was built at local government area level and for a range of health services (e.g. renal, physio, cardiac etc). It was based on extensive historical patient data (including demographic indicators) to forecast demand to 2021. It was used to inform future budget bids.

One of the most significant challenges of this project was cleaning and preparing the data for modelling. Although often comprehensive, many major government data sets are collected in, and extracted from legacy database systems and these systems have few error checking functions. This can mean we are given data with significant errors and gaps, which can break the models we are running. Although we always look for ways to automate the data preparation, sometimes, it just takes time and manual work.