National Benchmarking Portal

The National Benchmarking Portal is a website-based application that provides public access to insights from data collected by the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority. 

IHACPA is an independent agency that works in partnership with all Australian governments to improve health outcomes for all Australians.

As part of the health reforms that led to IHACPA’s establishment in 2011 we are responsible for setting a national efficient price for delivering public hospital services across Australia.

The national efficient price has two key purposes; to help determine the level of Commonwealth Government funding for public hospital services, and to provide a benchmark for the efficient cost of providing these services.

This is done through the implementation of ‘activity based funding’ – which is a way of funding public hospitals for the number and mix of patients they treat.

In order for activity based funding to be effective, every episode of patient care needs to be counted. 

We do this by collecting hospital cost and activity data in consultation with states and territories across Australia every quarter.

Cost data refers to the cost accrued during the delivery of an episode of patient care, categorised according to the different resources used during the episode. 

Activity data refers to the type and volume of the episodes of care.

The National Benchmarking Portal presents insights from the combination of these cost and activity datasets. To understand the data in the portal, first you need to understand how the data is standardised to allow for fair comparisons.

The insights presented in the portal use price weights and adjustments to draw comparisons between hospitals, local hospital networks, and states and territories, while taking into account the differences between these groups in terms of size, remoteness, and demographics of patients treated.

The combination of these price weights and adjustments is known as a ‘national weighted activity unit’, or ‘NWAU’.

To compare activity across hospitals, we use NWAU as a measure of hospital activity. NWAU accounts for the complexity and resource use of a hospital episode.

An episode of care with a higher NWAU value is typically more complex and more costly to deliver than an episode with a lower NWAU value.

Currently, the NBP has three measures - cost per NWAU, Hospital Acquired Complications or HACs and Avoidable Hospital Readmissions or AHRs.

In this video we discover the HAC and AHR measures. Users can view the cost per NWAU video through IHACPA’s website or video link at the end of this video.

Let’s first look at the HAC dashboards. A HAC is a complication which may occur during a patients stay at the hospital. The NBP presents three dashboards which provide information on HACs; HAC trends, HAC activity and NWAU adjustments.

Each dashboard compares episodes with HACs to non HAC episodes or previous years episodes with HACs. The dashboards present 15 HAC categories that are further split into subcategories. These are called complication groups and are listed in the filters on the left and in the user guide.

Before we explore the filters on the benchmarking portal, let’s go over some useful definitions.

Total count of episodes.

This refers to the number of hospital admissions which led to at least one kind of HAC.

Total number of HACs — This is the sum of all HACs, encountered by all patients. Let’s use an example to better understand this definition. These five patients represent 8 HACs.

Patient 2 had two healthcare associated infections, so we recorded HAC 3 twice during their admission.

In this example the total number of episodes with HACs will be 5 and total HAC count will be 7 as HAC 3 will only be counted once for patient 2. These definitions will help you better navigate through these dashboards.

HAC rate.

This is calculated as a percentage of total episodes with HACs per 10,000 episodes.

Comparisons can then be drawn in each visualisation by filtering the data by ‘Year’, ‘State’, ‘Local hospital network’, ‘Hospital’, ‘Hospital Peer Grouping’, ‘Complication group’ and age group.

As an example, let’s select pressure injury from the complication group filter for the year 202-21. All three dashboards filter to the current selection.

Alternatively, you can select the HAC complication from the HAC by group graph available on the HAC activity dashboard. This selection helps us compare pressure injury data for the current year to the previous year.

You can further narrow the search by selecting a peer group from the list of filters or by drawing a lasso around the desired peer group selection.

Other ways to filter data have been noted in the National Benchmarking Portal User Guide, which is available in the portal and on the IHACPA website.

Let’s now explore the AHR dashboards. Let’s navigate back to periodic insights and click on the AHR tab. Just as with HACs, there are three AHR dashboards presenting AHR trends, AHR activity and NWAU adjustments.

Understanding and preventing avoidable hospital readmissions can help support better health outcomes. There are 12 readmission groups presented in these dashboards.

You can use these dashboards to view visualisations for the current or previous year, or over time.

All graphs can be viewed in tabular form by clicking on the ‘Show table’ option. For further insight into each of the data representations, hover over the ‘Information’ icon.

Transparency is important, but privacy is too. Before data is uploaded to the National Benchmarking Portal, all of the patient information is de-identified. We do this by aggregating records that share a common variable, such as hospital or establishment, classification, stream or month of separation.

The national benchmarking portal also hides instances where the request returns statistics that are based on less than 30 records.

It is important that users of the National Benchmarking Portal familiarise themselves with the User Guide, as it contains detailed instructions on the navigation of the dashboards and proper interpretation of the data.

The ‘Glossary’ tab defines common terminology used in these dashboards. The User Guide and Glossary can be accessed via the menu in the top right corner of the portal, or on the IHACPA website. 

If you would like to learn more about the data collected by the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority, which underpins the pricing and funding of public hospital services in Australia, visit our website – ihacpa.gov.au.