The THCIC met to provide stakeholder updates on current operations and initiatives.
Data Systems Update
- Working on emergency department data; adding attending physician group
- The online system will have some modifications
- Attending physicians is required on ED claims; attending physician will be in the second position and operating physician will be in the first position; it is different for inpatient claims
- Will be putting a new release out January 5
Technical Manuals Update
- Have uploaded the outpatient manual and the appendices; have not got the ICD10 qualifying codes in but are working on that
- Have moved all of the audits to the appendices
- Inpatient manual is still under review
- No major changes to the inpatient manual
SB 7 (82nd) – PPC & PPR
- Have been in the process of developing these reports; still in the internal review process
- Required to work with IHCQE and will be sending the report to them once it goes through the commissioner’s office
- Hope to have it up sometime in the beginning of January
- Trying to get the data in the reports into the data query tool
Council Reports
- Have sent out the outpatient report; will still have additional reviews after stakeholder feedback is submitted
- Q: Who is the intended audience for the report; regular consumers may not understand it
- That was the intent; hard to put in layman’s terms; open to suggestions
- May just want to put some additional graphs showing data rather than explanations; there is a lot of language in it
- Lots of info in the report
- Number of procedures per visit
- 100 most common procedures performed broken down by category of patient
- 100 top characteristics of patient visits
- Q: There may need to be some sort of introduction explaining how the data can be used by consumers, researchers, etc.; is that being considered
- Can work on something like that
- Q: Is there a plan to do the same thing with 2013 data
- Yes, will be doing the same thing with PPCs and PPRs and 2013 data
CHS Data Query Tool
- CHS is in the process of developing the tool which will have multiple data sets; will be able to query individual data sets
- Have quite a bit of THCIC data going into it
- Still trying to figure out how best to present the data and what terminology is best to use
- There will be mortality data, population data, trauma data, nurse workforce survey data, birth defect data, nurse education data, nurse staffing information, hospital survey data for utilization and financials
- Scheduled to be implemented in January;
- Q: Is there any way to separate surgeries in hospitals from surgeries in surgery centers
- That information should be separated in the data
Sunset Advisory Commission Report
- Some of the main things in the reports were recommendations for HHSC and the enterprise agencies to consolidate
- Also recommending further consolidation of administrative support services
- Janek is already starting to make some changes in admin support
- There are multiple recommendations that relate directly to data that THCIC will be involved with
- One specific recommendations was for THCIC to continue the health care collection program but to coordinate it better with the HHSC system
- Will also be improving upon making data more easily understandable and translatable for health care consumers; working on that right now for the data query tool
- Expect a lot more questions coming in from legislators as we get closer to session