HRDA Team members Lee Ridoutt and Victoria Hirst completed a project in Ireland critical to that country’s future health financing as they move to a ‘Money follows the patient’ process of service payment – more widely understood as activity based funding (ABF).
The project overall, managed by a HRDA partner Pavilion Health, had many components aimed at ensuring that when Ireland transitions fully to an ABF basis for funding hospital services the coded casemix data on which funding is based will be as precise and timely as possible, and accurately reflect each hospital in Ireland’s real level of activity in terms of number and complexity of episodes of care. HRDA’s team members worked primarily on the HR and work organisation aspects, in particular on three components:
1. An analysis of the management of clinical coding services with the view to finding ways services can be managed, staffed and resourced to best practice levels.
2. An analysis of the training needs of the clinical coding workforce in terms of both numbers (new coders to be trained) and
3. The content of current and future courses to ensure the workforce is competent to deliver quality coded data.
The work in Ireland could have much wider application in Europe, but also many Asian countries already experimenting with ABF or attempting to base more decision making on quality casemix data. A series of journal articles related more narrowly to the HR components of the project are due to be published in the near future, to keep abreast of HRDA’s developments you can read our newsletters or join our mailing list here.