A fully digital and interactive version of the Hospital acquired complications report is now available via the VAHI portal for authenticated users.
The Hospital acquired complications interactive report (HACs report) provides information to assist health services to identify and understand variation in the level of complications their patients experience, and to support the design and evaluation of improvement activities.
After launching as a PDF report in 2020, the HACs report is moving to digital delivery through the VAHI portal, following a period of user testing and refinement.
One of those user testers was David Pilcher, Intensive Care Specialist at Alfred Health and Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) Centre for Outcome and Resource Evaluation.
Adjunct Professor Pilcher said the move to a digital format for the HACs report had been effective and was likely to be well received by health services.
“My experience of moving from static reports to interactive reports, in different spheres, is that they're really well received,” Adj Prof Pilcher said. “This seemed to be a pretty good attempt to try and actually provide that level of function where you can drill down into things, and does it in a way that which is relatively intuitive.”
Safer Care Victoria Senior Project Officer Joanna Gaston, another of the user testers, appreciated how easy it was to highlight which HACs were of interest for each health organisation.
“I thought it was fantastic because I could see at a glance what the main ones were,” Ms Gaston said. “So you could actually focus on those and benchmark yourself against other health services.”
Ms Gaston said delivering the report in a digital dashboard format opened up a range of monitoring and analysis options compared with printed or PDF based reports.
“I love the fact that it's digital,” she said. “And I love the fact that you potentially over the years could be looking at how was I two years ago, compared to what I am now. Hard copy is really difficult to see where you're making improvements.
“But that digital platform allows you at a glance, whatever intervals you decide, to show your data and see how people are trending. I think that is so helpful for an agency.”
With the design and functionality of the report well received so far, Adj Prof Pilcher said the next step is making sure the report is accessible to the right people – not just at the CEO and executive level but also at the clinical level of health services.
“To get it accessible to clinicians is partly about how it's getting them access to it, but also getting their input into looking at it. I think to really get a feel for it you almost need to actually play with it a little bit.”
The launch of the digital HACs report is another step forward for the VAHI portal, which continues to grow in content and functionality.
Users of the VAHI portal are able to access a growing range of interactive digital reports, which are made possible thanks to the capabilities supported VAHI Information Management Environment (VIME). VIME provides data sourcing and management, modelling and information architecture, storage and processing - as well as driving the data visualisations and automation underpinning our interactive reports.
The digital HACs report is the second interactive report available through the portal, following the Best Care report launched late last year.
The Best Care report was designed to allow for comparison between peer health services around potential instances of low value care, which includes non-urgent surgery procedures identified as having little or no benefit to patients based on current clinical evidence.
Hundreds of people from across Victoria’s health services and government departments have accessed the fully automated Best Care report, which gives users access to up-to-date data each week after the Victorian Administrative Episode Dataset is updated.
The HACs report was released on Wednesday 6 April for authenticated users via the VAHI portal. For more information about the portal or, if you work at a Victorian public healthcare service, to request authenticated access, please contact [email protected].
For more information about the HACs report or to arrange demonstration for authenticated users, please contact Dr Melisa Lau, Acting Manager of Clinical Reporting, via [email protected]