Demographics overview

Indigenous status

National Key Performance Indicator reporting almost exclusively reports on patients who are recorded as being Indigenous. In Communicare this means that they have an Indigenous Status recorded in their biographics of one of the following:

Aboriginal but not Torres Strait Islander
Torres Strait Islander but not Aboriginal
Both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Any exceptions are stated in the definition for that specific indicator.

OSR reporting is disaggregated by Indigenous Status. In these reports the following mapping is done:

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander - includes all patients with one of the above statuses recorded in their biographics.
Non-Aboriginal - any patient with an Indigenous Status of Neither Aboriginal nor Torres Strait
Not Recorded - any patient where the Indigenous Status is not recorded, or the Indigenous Status is Not stated/inadequately described or Not applicable.

Note: For OSR reporting, fictitious patients are excluded. Patients who died before the end of the reporting period are counted if they had any activity during the report period. Non-patient records are included to record group activity and contacts made with patients who do not normally attend this health service. For the purposes of disaggregation by Indigenous Status, all non-patients are recorded as Not Recorded.

Record status

For the AIHW definition of a Regular Client this status is determined by looking at the contacts made with a patient in the two years preceding the end of the report period. In Communicare, a patient's status must be one of the following:

Current
Transient
Past
Banned 30 days
Banned 60 days

Patients who have a Communicare patient status of Fictitious (either at the time the report is run or at the end of the report period) are excluded. Patients who had a Communicare patient status of Non-Patient at the end of the report period are also excluded.

Only services that have started are included: services with a status of Started, Paused or Finished are included. Services with the following statuses are excluded:

Booked
Cancelled
Waiting
Withdrawn

Additionally, services with the following modes are excluded:

All no client contact modes
Administration – client contact

If a patient has at least three such services in the two years preceding the end of the report period and they were still alive at the end of the report period, then they are deemed to be a regular client. However, see the comments in the Residence section below relating to the patient’s home address at the end of the report period and how this relates to use of the Locality Group parameter in Communicare reports.

OSR reporting does not use the Regular Client status. All patient records are included except Fictitious patient records. Non-patient records are included but reported with an Indigenous Status of Not Recorded.

Patient status

For nKPI reporting, all patients with a status of Non-Patient are excluded even if they have three visits in the previous two years.

For OSR reporting, the Non-Patient status is treated in the following way:

If the patient record has an MRN of #GROUP, group activity will be counted but not in the contacts, episodes or individuals reports.
If the patient record has an MRN of #ANON, any activity is disregarded. This means that the patient record is for anonymous activity and any age, sex or Indigenous status will be unknown so the data cannot be disaggregated.
If the patient record does not have an MRN of either #ANON or #GROUP, activity will also be disregarded.

To assist in the identification of any existing Non-Patient records where the addition of either #ANON or #GROUP is needed, refer to the report at Report > OSR > Non-Patient Analysis.This report should eventually report three main sections (if anonymous or group activity is recorded at the health service):

Group activity record: an example is UNIDENTIFIED CLIENTS. If the patient ID has an asterisk, this is currently being used for group activity.
Anonymous patient record: examples might be NEEDLE EXCHANGE, MALE or WALKIN, UNKNOWN.
Other non-patient records: these should all be real people but who only attend the health service for specific purposes other than their main health care, such as, dental only patients or ITC patients referred from a private GP for supplementary services. If they should be included in the nKPI reports and the OSR reports, their status must be changed from non-patient.

Tip:

Only use the Non-Patient status for the following reasons:

To record biographic details of a carer who is responsible for a patient of the health service but who does not attend for their own health care
To record a real patient who may attend the health service for a single purpose, such as a dental clinic, but who belongs to another health service and does not require any other health service delivery, such as health check reminders, blood tests, chronic disease management, and so on.
To record anonymous services such as group information sessions, anonymous needle exchange, health promotion events, and so on.

Residence

A patient must have had a home address at the end of the report period. What this means is that a patient added after the end of the report period will not be included even if they have backdated service activity.

When the Locality Group filter is used for any of the Communicare reports the patient list is filtered to those patients whose home address locality at the end of the report period was within the defined list of localities that make up that locality group. It is important that the locality groups defined at the health service are accurate and inclusive. To help you review your locality groups run the following reports:

To print a list of all localities within all locality groups, run Report > Reference Tables > Locality Groups. Maintenance to these lists is done at File > Reference Tables > Locality Groups.
To look for omissions and mistakes, run Report > Reference Tables > Locality Group Analysis.
Tip: Run this report with a range of post codes that covers your health service area completely.

The resulting report will show all locality groups and indicate which localities belong to multiple or no such groups. Maintenance to these lists is done at File > Reference Tables > Locality Groups.

Age groups

The default nKPI age groups are:

0-4 years
5-14 years
15-24 years
25-34 years
35-44 years
45-54 years
55-64 years
65+ years

Where stated in a specific indicator these may vary. For example, child immunisation age groups differ as do antenatal care age groups.

Age is calculated at the end of the report period (unless a specific indicator states otherwise). Patients who died during the preceding two years but who have had three valid services recorded will be excluded.

Contact types

OSR reporting requires disaggregation of provider types when reporting on contacts. In Communicare, a provider type is in recorded in Communicare in the Provider reference table: in File > Providers, select the provider type from the Speciality list.
Example Provider specialty

For information about how the Communicare speciality is mapped to the OSR contacts report, see Client Contact Types reference

Note: Services provided exclusively by a Transport Worker (as recorded in Communicare in the Provider reference table) are excluded from the OSR Episodes of Health Care report.