National Benchmarking Portal

The National Benchmarking Portal (NBP) is a secure website-based application that provides access to data collected by the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA).

IHACPA believes that open access to data, alongside appropriate privacy protections, will enable informed policy decisions and improve patient outcomes. IHACPA has made the NBP publicly available to allow these insights to be accessed by a wide audience including clinicians, hospital managers, researchers and the general public.

The benchmarking portal includes insights from data collected between 2017-18 and 2020-21. The NBP contains three areas of focus:

Cost per NWAU
Hospital Acquired Complications (HACs)
Avoidable Hospital Readmissions (AHRs)

There are three dashboards for each area of focus. The user can explore a Cost per NWAU Overview dashboard before searching for more details via the Cost Detail and National Weighted Activity Unit (NWAU) Detail dashboards. The HAC and AHR areas of focus each provide dashboards on Trends, Activity Detail, and NWAU Adjustment Detail.

Within each dashboard the user can filter data according to their chosen state or territory, local hospital network, hospital, or AIHW hospital peer group as well as other, dashboard-specific filters.

All data is aggregated using common variables including hospitals or establishments, classification end-class, care stream and month of separation. If a user selects filters that result in a sufficiently small sample size (30 records for Cost per NWAU and 20 records for HAC and AHR areas of focus), indicators and charts are masked in order to maintain patient confidentiality and statistical robustness.

Access the National Benchmarking Portal

To help you navigate the portal, the following supporting documents and resources are available in the portal:

User Guide – Contains detailed instructions on how to use the NBP, with guidance on understanding the features, applying filters based on streams, care types and location, and developing graphs that draw meaningful results.
Technical Specifications – Specifies the data sources utilised within the NBP, and background to the preparation undertaken in the development of the portal.

It is important that users of the NBP familiarise themselves with the supporting User Guide, as it contains detailed instructions on the navigation of the dashboards and proper interpretation of the data.

IHACPA has also developed instructional videos to guide users through the portal.

Watch a practical walk-through of the portal in the following short videos to learn how to use and interpret the data within the portal.