Admitted acute care
Admitted acute care is care in which the primary treatment goal is to:
- manage labour (obstetric)
- cure illness or provide definitive treatment of injury
- perform surgery
- relieve symptoms of illness or injury (excluding palliative care)
- reduce severity of an illness or injury
- protect against exacerbation of illness or injury which could threaten life or normal function
- perform diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.
The Australian Coding Standards (ACS) are a set of rules used by health information managers and clinical coders in the assignment of codes that represent diseases or interventions relevant for episodes of admitted patient care. The ACS are used with the following classifications:
- International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM)
- Australian Classification of Health Interventions (ACHI)
This classification system is collectively known as ICD-10-AM/ACHI/ACS and is used for admitted patient care including acute, subacute and mental health care.
The Australian Refined Diagnosis Related Groups (AR-DRG) classification provides a clinically meaningful way to relate or group the number and type of patients treated in admitted acute episodes of care to the resources required in treatment. The AR-DRG classification is underpinned by data coded using ICD-10-AM/ACHI/ACS along with other routinely collected data to classify admitted acute patient episodes.
Since 1 July 2020 AR-DRG Version 10.0 has been used to price admitted acute care in Australian public hospitals. AR-DRG Version 11.0 was released in July 2022 and will be used for pricing admitted acute care in Australian public hospitals from 1 July 2023.
These classifications are interrelated but have different use cases as illustrated below.
*Acute admitted care includes newborn care
Classification products
With a relevant licence agreement, you can purchase the following products for the AR-DRG classification system and the ICD-10-AM/ACHI/ACS classification system:
- ICD-10-AM Tabular List
- ICD-10-AM Alphabetic Index
- ACHI Tabular List
- ACHI Alphabetic Index
- Australian Coding Standards
- AR-DRG Definitions Manual
- Mapping tables for ICD-10-AM and ACHI
- Code lists for ICD-10-AM and ACHI.
For further information, including how to purchase the classification products, please see Products and licences.
Key documents
Key links
- About ICD-10-AM/ACHI/ACS
- About AR-DRGs
- Australian Classification Exchange (ACE)
- Product and licence information
- Purchase classification products
- Data set specifications
- Governance framework for the development of the admitted care classifications
- Revision of ICD-10-AM/ACHI/ACS and AR-DRG Development Cycles (and revised phase out of AR-DRGs)