What is IHPA and why has the AMHCC been developed?
IHPA is an independent government agency established by the Commonwealth as part of the National Health Reform Act 2011, to implement national Activity Based Funding (ABF) for Australian public hospitals.
In order to implement ABF, care needs to be classified. Classifications aim to provide the health care sector with a nationally consistent method of classifying all types of patients, their treatment and associated costs in order to provide better management, measurement and pricing of high quality and efficient health care services. Classifications are comprised of codes that provide clinically meaningful ways of relating the types of patients treated by a facility to the resources required.
At present, there is no single classification used for mental health services. For ABF purposes, admitted mental health services have been priced using the diagnosis-based Australian Refined Diagnosis Related Groups (AR-DRGs) since 1 July 2013. This is not ideal for pricing in the longer term because diagnosis is not as strong a driver of resource utilisation for mental health services as it is in other services, and it can only be applied in the admitted setting.
IHPA has been working since 2012 to develop a new classification system for mental health care. While IHPA will only use the classification to determine the price for Commonwealth funding to states and territories for ABF services, classifications can have broader uses to provide more accurate and consistent data about the services provided across different mental health care settings, including inpatients, outpatients, residential, subacute and community services.
An effective way of classifying mental health care across settings will be of use to many different levels of the health system. The AMHCC will allow individual services and service systems such as state and territory health departments, Local Health Networks, non-government and private organisations to better understand how their mental health services work and where clinical, financial and other resources are applied. The AMHCC will also enable performance benchmarking across similar services.
In late 2014, IHPA engaged Mental Health Australia to conduct a twelve month program of work to assist in the engagement of the community managed mental health sector in the development of the AMHCC. IHPA appreciates the added insight this work provided and notes that more work is required in the future to consider how the AMHCC could be broadened to accommodate the role of the community managed sector.
IHPA welcomes Mental Health Australia’s continued contribution to the refinement of the AMHCC through its representation on IHPA’s Mental Health Working Group.
