The NRS Steering Committee emphasises that this is the first version of a complex and challenging product - the development of a standardised national classification system across ten professions! The current version has many limitations and, with national implementation, there will be a need for further review, development and validation. NAHCC will be constantly monitoring the implementation and application of the Australian Allied Health Classification System. The system will be revised periodically according to the experiences and feedback from the users and in response to changes in the broader health care environment .

The National Allied Health Casemix Committee is currently working on accessing resources for producing Version 2 of the Australian Allied Health Classification System. Comments and suggestions on Version 1 are welcomed; please forward these to the NAHCC Executive Officer (see back page for contact details).

Indicators for Intervention

A clear finding of both the reference standards project and the experience of many allied health professionals, was that allied health activities often correlate poorly with the medical diagnosis. One of the new variables forming part of the minimum data item set is Indicator for Intervention (IFI) which is the allied health professional’s diagnosis code. There is, as yet, no classification system for IFI, but allowance should be made for it when designing fields for activity recording systems.

NAHCC is addressing the development of IFIs in its two-year strategic plan and hopes to have IFI included in a subsequent version of the Australian Allied Health Classification System.

Development of National Allied Health Service Weights

Once the National Allied Health Activity Classification and Minimum Data Set have been in operation for an extended period of time across multiple settings and disciplines, there will be a strong data base that could be applied to the development of allied health service weights. This would need to be considered in relation to future directions established by the Commonwealth Casemix Development Plan.

Benchmarking

Having a solid information base on the role that allied health plays in health care will be valuable for benchmarking and could be used as a base for further research into allied health outcome measures.

Australian data will also end the practice of using the generally less appropriate U.S. allied health staff ratios and service weights for the Australian setting.

Coding

From July 1 1998, the seven digit Generalised Allied Health Intervention codes (see page 2 in the second section of this document) will be used by Health Information Managers and coding staff to code allied health activities - forming part of the procedures listing in the national morbidity data set.

At this stage, the IPA and NIPA classifications will not be coded as part of this dataset but will be valuable for departmental management activities, national classification and costing studies (eg Developmental Ambulatory Classification System - DACS) and for allied health research activities..

Software Development

NAHCC is working on specifications for software packages that may be used to collect and collate data. These will then be used to evaluate the capacity of existing commercially available software to satisfactorily achieve this task. These specifications, which are utilising the Australian Allied Health Classification System, are expected to be released in late 1997.

Replacement of the occasion of service statistic with patient attributable activity

Occasions of service is a statistic used by many health services around the country and is defined in the National Health Data Dictionary. The value of this measure was examined by the NRS project but was not incorporated into the minimum data set because it was not a good indicator of:

• illness severity or complexity of the client
• resource utilisation
• workload / input of the staff.

NAHCC is working to have occasions of service replaced by a more meaningful Clinical Care statistic.