Technical supplement
Summary
This technical supplement summarises methods used to calculate measures presented in Hospital Performance: Costs of acute admitted patients in public hospitals from 2011–12 to 2013–14. Due to the complexity of the methods used, this supplement is targeted at individuals with technical expertise in health informatics.
The report compares hospitals based on the costs of acute admitted patients. Admissions (same day and overnight) are weighted to account for the complexity of a patient’s condition(s) and procedure(s) using the Australian Refined–Diagnosis Related Group (AR–RG) patient classification system and adjusted for individual patient characteristics. The aim of this work is to assess the efficiency of public hospitals.
The following measure is described in this technical supplement:
- Cost per National Weighted Activity Unit (NWAU), including total NWAU.
The report includes new analyses for 2012–3 and 2013–4 along with results from the National Health Performance Authority’s (the Authority’s) earlier report Hospital Performance: Costs of acute admitted patients in public hospitals in 2011–12. The new analyses use a different method from the previous report and this is the focus of this Technical Supplement. For details on the 2011–12 data refer to Hospital Performance: Costs of acute admitted patients in public hospitals in 2011–12, Technical Supplement.1
To determine the validity of time series comparisons across multiple financial years, the Authority conducted analysis on the extent of changes between these two methods.
Results for more than 100 major and large Australian public hospitals are available on the AIHW website.