Knowledge is power: transforming rehabilitation data into information

The Australian Health Service Alliance (AHSA) is a company that provides a number of services to more than 20 private health insurers, one of which is data management. AHSA prides itself on having excellent data and being able to provide it in an accurate, complete and timely manner, particularly Hospital Casemix Protocol (HCP), which is a combination of demographic and episode information, such as diagnosis and procedure codes, admission and separation dates. These data are used for analysis, benchmarking, negotiations (with private hospitals) and statutory reporting. However,AHSA had considerable data that could not be utilised effectively in the area of rehabilitation, due to the existence of a separate rehabilitation file (unlinked to the episode), and missing key information to describe the type of rehabilitation. This paper discusses the process put in place to transform data into useful and meaningful information, for analysis, benchmarking and payment model development.