Mature use of casemix — are we there yet?

Abstract

What is known about the topic?While Australia has become a world leader in the design and production of casemix groupers and the underlying clinical classification system, the use of casemix information at the grass roots level is still limited to mainly administrative and managerial staff. What does this paper add? This paper suggests that there is still scope for further development in the use of casemix information in the clinical domain, suggesting that maturity will be achieved when the casemix data and the hospital discharge data on which they are based are used routinely to underpin a wide range of clinical issues including quality of care and safety issues. What are the implications for practitioners?There is a need for greater engagement of clinicians to enhance the use of casemix data in clinical decision making.

Best practice in the management of clinical coding services: Insights from a project in the Republic of Ireland, Part 1

“…In addition to these characteristics, visibility would no doubt be enhanced, and be more valuable too, as a consequence of greater clinician and executive engagement in ABF implementation. Clinician engagement and education has also been shown to be vital to improve the documentation in the medical record and the quality of the coding (Reid, 2013: 330) and to the use of casemix data within hospitals by clinical managers (Balnave and Reid, 2007).…”