Hospital Morbidity Data System (HMDS)
The Hospital Morbidity Data Collection maintains the inpatient discharge summary data from all public and private hospitals in Western Australia on the information system known as Hospital Morbidity Data System (HMDS).The Collection instrument for the HMDS is the HA22 form. An electronic form representing a statistical summary of a hospital separation is supplied for each inpatient event. Data are passed through a comprehensive series of edits to create clean records. Separations failing edits are referred back to the hospitals for correction.
In order to meet state and national requirements, the HMDS updates on an annual basis a list of data items collected through HA22 form or its electronic equivalent. These updates are then published in the HMDS Reference Manual to facilitate the data collection process.
The data collection comprises:
- Approximately 16,000,000 inpatient records dating back to 1970
- Snapshots of waitlist data dating back to 1991
- Hospital survey data since 1993 - this includes information on available beds, specialised services and accreditation status
- Summary data since 1989/90 financial year (HA215 collection). The HA215 report is provided monthly by hospitals detailing hospital admissions (inpatient) and occasions of service for outpatient and emergency events. This information is reported quarterly annually to the Commonwealth.
In addition to the collection and management of the data, the HMDS team is responsible for the obligatory annual provision of data to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing, as mandated under the Australian Health Care Agreement. The requirements are defined in terms of data items included in National Minimum Data Sets.
The HMDS team also:
- Provide support for data entry and maintenance of data entry packages in private hospitals
- Provide education and quality assurance for clinical coding and data entry
- Provide data in response to regular and ad hoc data requests
- Develop analytical tools and maintain meta data