Population health analytics

Alberta health access analytics, built as a decision brief.

I built this project after working through clinic-level records and referral logic. The next question was wider: where does access friction show up at the provincial level, who carries more of it, and how would I explain the tradeoffs to a health-system audience?

Open report Back to analytics

Why I built itAccess

I wanted to move from individual clinical records to system-level access evidence.

The ophthalmology projects taught me how much clinical decisions depend on clean, structured records. This project applies the same discipline to a broader public-health question: how should Alberta's access performance be described when the data includes waits, care contact, gender gaps, unmet need, and medication affordability?

DataR workflow

The analysis turns two Statistics Canada extracts into a reusable evidence layer.

Imported and harmonized 2024 wait-time and health access datasets.
Benchmarked Alberta against Ontario and Canada excluding territories.
Separated percentage indicators from person-count context tables.
Created Tableau-ready exports for benchmarking, gender gaps, KPI summaries, and province scorecards.
Kept interpretation descriptive: no causal claims, no site-level inference, and no overreach beyond the aggregate data.

FindingsTradeoffs

The result is a conditional winner story, not a simple leaderboard.

Alberta performs well under a balanced scorecard across wait, access, experience, equity, and affordability, but Ontario leads when the weighting emphasizes timeliness and access flow.

Alberta wait burden remains high: 19.8% waited six months or more and 66.2% reported life affected by wait time.
Women+ reported materially higher friction, including primary-care difficulty (+10.2 pp), specialist-care difficulty (+9.2 pp), unmet need (+6.2 pp), and discrimination (+5.7 pp).
Alberta showed an affordability paradox: medication coverage was 85.5%, but cost-related medication nonadherence was still 16.0%.
The balanced scorecard favored Alberta (+1.072), while a timeliness/access-heavy scenario favored Ontario (-0.818).

What it taught meHealth systems

Single metrics are too brittle for access decisions.

This project sharpened the way I think about health-system analytics: a useful access brief should hold multiple truths at once. It should show where a system is strong, where patients still experience friction, which groups carry more burden, and how the conclusion changes when leaders prioritize different outcomes.