National Health Performance Authority: Hospital Performance: Average length of stay (ALOS) for multi-day stay patients in Australian public hospitals, 2013-2015
Indicator Attributes
Identifying and definitional attributes | |
Metadata item type: | Indicator |
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Indicator type: | Indicator |
Short name: | Average length of stay for multi-day stay patients |
Synonymous names: | ALOS |
METEOR identifier: | 584301 |
Registration status: | National Health Performance Authority (retired), Retired 01/07/2016 |
Description: | The average (mean) length of stay for multi-day stay patients within a given Australian Refined Diagnosis-Related Group (AR-DRG) in Australian public hospitals. |
Indicator set: |
Collection and usage attributes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Computation description: | To calculate the average length of stay the key unit that records information about a patient's stay in hospital is called an 'episode of admitted patient care'. This records information about the patient and the care they received in hospital, including:
Exclusions: The average length of stay indicator relates only to acute patients with a multi-day, or overnight, stay. The following episodes of care are excluded from all reported measures:
Outlier removal: Episodes determined to be extreme long stay outliers were removed. Outlier bounds are derived for each AR-DRG. The method selected for deriving national level outlier bounds uses the inter-quartile ranges as the guide for outlier exclusion. The method of detecting extreme outliers (mEO) is as follows: mEO = Q3 + k*(Q3-Q1)
Where Q1 equals the 25th percentile value Q3 equals the 75th percentile value k equals non-negative values of a constant. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to identify k and resulted in k=10 being selected. This method is complemented by a minimum for the outlier bound of 20.
Reporting of results: Average length of stay is reported for the following AR-DRG (version 6.0x). The average length of stay is only reported for Australian public hospitals that have at least 10 multi-day stays within a given AR-DRG.
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Computation: | Numerator ÷ denominator | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Numerator: | Number of overnight bed days attributable to a given AR-DRG for an Australian public hospital. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Numerator data elements: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Denominator: | Number of multi-day stays attributable to a given AR-DRG for an Australian public hospital. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Disaggregation: | Disaggregation is by:
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Representational attributes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Representation class: | Mean (average) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Data type: | Time period | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Unit of measure: | Time (e.g. days, hours) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Format: | Days, rounded to 1 dp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Indicator conceptual framework | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Framework and dimensions: | PAF-Efficiency | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Reporting requirements: | National Health Performance Authority | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Organisation responsible for providing data: | Australian Institute of Health and Welfare |