Health Geographics has as its CEO Dr Jeanine McMullan, an experienced Australian GP with a major in Statistical Research, who is in charge of mapping for the ADS group. HGS is drawing on our background at ADS in consulting reports for Churches, the Welfare sector, private and public hospitals and charitable donors.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme is going to drive massive changes in our labour force and in our welfare sector. We know this because we model labour market movements quarterly and we have already picked up strong links between our health sector variables and jobs growth to the May quarter 2017.

Four in ten jobs created in the last 12 months have been in the public sector and these are overwhelmingly persons transitioning from welfare to the labour market via the NDIS.

We’re already looking to adapt our school dashboard and map product to a suitable set of variables for the NDIS, including the obvious ones like need for assistance, as well as variables showing numbers of current carers and recipients of a disability benefit. We currently have 750 plus variables in our database and these include spending on GPs, Dentists, Opticians, Physios, Chiros and chemists. We intend to build on this from the Household Expenditure Survey and the Census.

Given our experience in the education sector, we are looking to develop special national health sector dashboards and interactive maps which can be sliced and diced to whatever spatial units are required, from national managers, down to local agents, allowing managers to set targets and monitor them, using the same data model.

HGS can model individual NDIS client roll outs in selected areas and extrapolate these results onto as yet untapped regions, as our demographic templates use an underlying national model down to SA1 level. So providers can make realistic estimates of the demand for services and the associated costs down to the smallest census units.