How can we compare volumes of work between hospitals to assist in developing annual contracts, given variation in population characteristics, in hospital access and in hospital departmental structure?
by
Ian Westbrooke
NZ Health Funding Authority (now at NZ Department of Conservation)
Coauthors: James Hogan (NZ Health Funding Authority)

We first created standardised hospital volumes from defined regions of population, for consistent diagnostic groups. This was the easy part - establishing the expected volumes for each region, given the population characteristics such as age, sex ethnicity and a socio-economic indicator, the NZ deprivation index. We could then compare the expected volume with that actually happening.

However the government contracts with hospitals not regional populations, based on hospital departmental structure, not diagnosis. I will describe how we used the results for regional populations and diagnosis groups and an iterative proportional fit approach to create standardised volumes. Determining the key population characteristics to include, and the level of detail of diagnosis needed were particularly interesting and important.

Date received: August 13, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cadt-15.