Case Study: Canterbury District Health Board achieves self-service analytics and data-driven decision-making with Tableau Software

Canterbury District Health Board drives self-service analytics

Canterbury District Health Board (DHB) is the main planner and funder of health services for more than 540,000 people in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. The Decision Support team managed nearly 20 years of patient-activity data—almost 500 million events across admissions, outpatient appointments, ED attendances, pharmacy, radiology and labs—but relied on static reports and ad‑hoc queries that caused delays and limited insight. The DHB needed a way to give a broad group of staff easy, self‑service access to interactive data to support faster, more informed decisions.

The DHB adopted Tableau (Desktop, Server and Reader) with support from partner Montage to automate reporting, share interactive dashboards via SharePoint, and enable self‑service analytics. Within three years they deployed about 45 workbooks (~100 views), automated refreshes as often as every 15 minutes, and began sharing dashboards with other South Island DHBs. The result: faster turnaround, better visibility into patient cohorts and outliers, a stronger data‑driven culture, and more engaged, higher‑quality analytics staff.

Canterbury District Health Board

John Wilkinson

Decision Support Manager