25 July 2022

Conor Murphy recently joined the VAHI team as the new director of the Health Services Data (HSD) team. In this profile he shares some of his extensive health experience and focus for the team into the future.

Before coming to VAHI

I’m a health information manager by trade. I have worked for a large number of tertiary public, private and regional hospitals, and worked as a case mix manager and business analyst. I worked overseas in case mix, implementing Australian activity-based funding arrangements in Middle East in Qatar, Bahrain, UAE and Saudi Arabia. I also worked for Healthscope as Acting National Health Information Manager overseeing the administration and health information needs of 43 private hospitals for a number of years. After working in consultancy over in the Middle East, I came back to Australia and have spent the last five years at the Department Justice and Safety as the General Manager Health Information Systems Support.

Attraction of the role

One of the things that I find very rewarding is the ability to do work that delivers value to a broad stakeholder group. And I think the performance data collections that VAHI manage, that largely sit in in the HSD team, goes right back to the essence of service delivery, service performance and service planning. Being able to capture, create, disseminate and interrogate that information and provide that to health services gets back to the core of effective health service delivery. I really see it as an enabling role. So yeah, that's what drew me to the role, being able to make a difference.

Focus for the Health Services Data team

There’s a broad departmental initiative to drive digital health uplift in terms of advancing the technical capability of our tools. Making sure that our information holdings are in the latest and greatest format, that we are online, and that we are providing that information to as many stakeholders as possible.

This goes alongside ensuring the quality of the information we're providing is at its best, and that we're doing everything possibly can to ensure data quality, right from collection through to provision of information. So yeah, that's the direction I'd like to take the HSD. Future proofing our collections, future proofing our ability to analyse that information and provide that back to stakeholders.                                                                                                                               

Key upcoming work

The data cube uplift is definitely one piece of work that I'd like to highlight. This is essentially taking our current data cubes in their current structure, and uplifting them to a cloud compatible Azura analysis, Power BI structure. So there's a few components to that work. There's the initial uplift work, taking from current architecture to future architecture. And then there's also the kind of data quality piece of work, around removing irrelevant data items, putting in new, more relevant data items, and making sure all of our data definitions, data dictionaries, and supporting documents are all up to date.

Final word

I think what we do at is super important and that in general, the work that everybody does in VAHI is incredibly valuable. And from what I've seen to date, everybody at VAHI is very passionate about it.

You can get in touch with Conor to discuss all things Health Services Data via [email protected]