Patient Classification Systems International 2014 - Patient information for better choice: abstracts.

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Background Clinical and non-clinical health leaders both seek to leverage data to drive innovative improvements in models of care and create sustainable and effective health systems. For the last three years, Activity-Based Funding (ABF) has been the main driver for funding public hospitals in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The data generated by the implementation of ABF has been used for both policy and funding decisions. As quality improved, the data became more relevant to a wide range of stakeholders, and drove improved interactions and conversations between clinicians and administrators. These conversations and opportunities were particularly relevant for patient-level clinical costing. This process uses a large range of data sets to allocate costs, and is presented with patient activity data that are familiar to clinicians. Clinical analytics, which leverages on cost and activity data, are being used to shape the future of local health systems, improve service delivery, and enhance patient outcomes. This shift moves the system from ABF to Activity-Based Management (ABM), through which data can be used not only for funding the annual budgets of Local Health Districts (LHDs) but also to inform local policy decisions. For several years, LHDs have submitted annual patient costing data returns to the Ministry of Health. Until recently, however, they saw few benefits from the effort required to submit these data, since state-wide benchmarking and variance analysis were limited and/or provided with significant time delays. The ABM Portal was created and launched to address this issue. The Portal provides a rich data source that can support local decision-making about clinical care evaluations, reduce unwarranted clinical variations, improve care models, facilitate service planning, and effectively manage services within budget. The ABM Portal was developed with significant input from clinicians and is currently being expanded to incorporate additional data elements. The ABM Portal contains data aggregated to LHDs from patient-level data, enabling users to drill down to the lowest-level information and understand the causes of any identified variances (i.e., in cost or length of stay).