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Allied Health Data
The availability of timely, meaningful and accurate Allied Health data is extremely important for ensuring favourable outcomes for the professions, arising from informed decision making in clinical practice, service development and negotiation and professional development. The need for Allied Health data to be meaningful is extremely important. For example, there has (and to some extent still is) an obsession with recording Occasions of Service (OoS), which are meaningless predictors of Allied Health cost, efficacy and outcomes.
A key requirement of this data is that it be comparable across sites to enable quality review activities such as benchmarking to be performed. As a result, there is a need for data standardisation, which has largely been achieved through the use of the Australian Allied Health Classification System (AAHCS). The AAHCS divides Allied Health interventions into a Clinical Care, Clinical Service Management, Teaching or Research streams.
Whilst the AAHCS sets out definitions for each of the streams, one of its main problems relates to the manner in which individual practitioners interpret the definitions. A recent review by the National Allied Health Benchmarking Consortium (Law D, Personal Communication 2002) indicated a 69% compliance with the definitions, which suggested that further training was required to ensure greater comparability, a process that is currently being undertaken. Similarly, active marketing programs are also required to guarantee the widespread adoption of this system in all Allied Health settings.
Another issue relates to the discrepancy that often exists, particularly for admitted patients, between the reason for the patient’s presentation to the hospital and the reason for the Allied Health intervention. For instance, a patient being treated for cancer of the oesophagus may require an Allied Health intervention for pneumonia. The development of the Allied Health Indicators for Intervention (IFI) is a step in the right direction, in that this system is useful for describing the characteristics of the patient being treated, i.e. it is more a wellness system than a sickness system. Interestingly, Woodruff et al (2000:94) indicate that high-level IFI's are no better at predicting intervention time for admitted patients than the use of Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG). This finding suggests that lower level (more specific) IFI's may be more useful for specific clinical use.
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