Reconciling hospital-acquired complications and CHADx+ in Victorian coded hospital data:

Background:The Council of Australian Governments has focused the attention of health service managers and state health departments on a list of hospital-acquired complications (HACs) proposed as the basis of funding adjustments for poor quality of hospital inpatient care. These were devised for the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care as a subset of their earlier classification of hospital-acquired complications (CHADx) and designed to be used by health services to monitor safety performance for their admitted patients.Objective:To improve uptake of both classification systems by clarifying their purposes and by reconciling the ICD-10-AM code sets used in HACs and the Victorian revisions to the CHADx system (CHADx+).Method:Frequency analysis of individual clinical codes with condition onset flag (COF 1) included in both classification systems using the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset for 2014/2015 (n = 2,623,275 separations). Narrative description of the resulting differences in ...