Non-admitted care
Non-admitted care encompasses services provided to patients who do not undergo a formal admission process and do not occupy a hospital bed.
For example, non-admitted services may be provided in:
- hospital outpatient clinics
- community based clinics
- patients’ homes.
The current classification system for non-admitted care is the Tier 2 Non-Admitted Services Classification (Tier 2). Tier 2 categorises a hospital’s non-admitted services into classes based on the nature of the service provided and the type of clinician providing the service. Read more about Tier 2 here.
A new non-admitted care classification
In 2018, the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) commenced a national costing study to inform the development of a new non-admitted care classification. The costing study was suspended in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19.
IHACPA is currently working to develop a new classification for non-admitted care services, through the Australian Non-Admitted Classification Project.
The purpose of developing a new non-admitted care classification is to describe non-admitted activity according to patient characteristics and the complexity of care. This will more accurately reflect the costs of non-admitted public hospital services for activity based funding and to move away from a classification based on a service and clinic that the patient attended.
The first step in this process is working with jurisdictions to assess the feasibility of utilising existing data in electronic medical records, other information systems and cost data to develop a comprehensive cost and activity data set to support the development of a new classification.
IHACPA proposes to undertake an iterative process to develop and implement the new non-admitted care classification, which includes the transition from aggregate clinic attendance data to patient level clinical data.