PowerHealth Supports Costing Data Peer Review with PPM Victorian Benchmarking Module

Currently, peer review data is available following submission to the Victorian Cost Data Collection (VCDC) but results are only released annually, a significant period of time after the financial period.

The PPM Victorian Benchmarking Module (VBM) standardises costing data from each participating hospital and transmits anonymised data to PowerHealth for amalgamation. The costing output is standardised to allow meaningful comparison across sites with different internal reference values.

Reports have been created using PPM’s built-in query tools. Benchmarking data is held in user accessible tables on the central benchmarking server. Sites can access the pre-made queries, or create their own custom reports and visualisations using PPM’s inbuilt reporting functionality. Future phases of the project will include pre-made dashboards and visualisations around this data.

Initial Outcomes

Six Health Services, representing 18 hospitals, are currently involved with the Victorian Benchmarking Module, with early results realising a range of tangible benefits:

• Enables analysis of cost data across health units, creating understanding for each hospital about where they differ from their peers 
• Provides the opportunity to benchmark, review variations, target problem areas and talk to clinicians about areas of improvement at a classification level
• Allows resource time to be spent on issues that are relevant to each target audience
• Provides the ability to act on results in a timely manner; as soon as costs are entered into the system, users can access the server and extract the reports
• Provides the opportunity to support other hospitals by sharing performance improvement initiatives
• Ensures information is easily extractable in custom formats for downstream reporting requirements, e.g. budget proposals and quality improvement projects