IHACPA Annual Report 2025–26

The annual report details our activities throughout the 2025–26 financial year. This includes the financial and operational performance against planned outcomes in the 2025–26 Portfolio Budget Statements and IHACPA’s 2025–26 Work Program and Corporate Plan.

Highlights

Corporate

• Crafted for and by IHACPA staff, we released a strategic plan for 2025–30, which is the first of its kind for our agency. It presents our ambitious vision for the future, our purpose, values, and the steps we will take to achieve our goals. 
• We hosted over 550 attendees in person and online at the IHACPA Conference 2025 in Adelaide, South Australia from 5 to 7 August 2025.

Public hospitals

• We consulted on the future of IHACPA classifications to ensure they remain clinically current and enable consistent and accurate data reporting that support interoperability across the healthcare journey.
• Virtual care integration, classification updates, pricing model refinements and updates to COVID-19 temporary measures were introduced in the pricing framework for public hospitals services released in December 2025.
• The release of our pricing determination in March 2026 included refinements to pricing for admitted acute care such as new groupings for maternal care, organ donation after death, and new principles for consistent grouping of intervention-based episodes of care. This was based on the release of a new classification for admitted acute care released in July 2025. 
• We investigated improvements in data capture, costing and pricing of posthumous organ donation, retrieval and transplantation services and identified 15 recommendations as part of a final report released in April 2026.
• The national cost data collection was completed, with public and private sector reports published in June 2026. The public sector report included data from 774 health service providers and public hospitals from across Australia, an increase of 34 compared to the previous year.

Aged care

• Our residential aged care consultation identified opportunities for support for improving provider participation in cost collections, alternative funding model arrangements and suggestions for adjustments to national aged care funding model.
• We provided recommendations for the national aged care classification price and estimated gaps between the costs and related revenue received by residential care homes as part of our residential pricing advice released in September 2025.
• Updates to the pricing principles, consideration for funding model refinements and priorities for future price advice was published in the pricing framework for residential aged care services. 
• With input from almost 200 residential aged care homes, our residential aged care cost collection combined real-time measurement of direct care time with additional workforce, resident and activity data.
• Our data collection relating to in-home care captured and analysed detailed cost data from 135 services, covering over 35,000 clients and was based on 220 public submissions. This was to produce a comprehensive dataset and improve the accuracy of cost and service delivery estimates across in-home care services through our pricing framework and pricing advice.
• We released a pricing policy for aged care, which provided transparency and clarity on our principles, processes and approach to developing pricing advice across residential aged care, residential respite care and in-home aged care.