Speakers 30 November 2012
Chris Aisbett
Chris Aisbett of Laeta Pty Ltd has over 28 years experience of working in Casemix classification, costing and funding and has played a pivotal role in the technical design and implementation of numerous Casemix based projects, supported by the Australian and International governments, academic institutions and the private sector. His participation in service weight development and costings, and his ongoing role in producing cost weight schedules in NSW, has facilitated the implementation of Casemix based funding. He is the Chief Technical Advisor to the Irish Casemix Programme and until recently, was an executive member of the learned body, Patient Classification Systems International (PCSI).
Professor David Ben-Tovim
Professor David Ben-Tovim is a psychiatrist and clinical epidemiologist by background. He has had a long involvement in Casemix development, having at one time been an advisor to the Australian Clinical Casemix Committee, chairing groups that made major structural revisions to Mental Health, Substance abuse and Diseases and Disorders of the Nervous System DRGs. He has also been involved in issues in work related to Out-Patient services and Sub-acute care. Currently, he is leading the Redesigning Care program at the Flinders Medical Centre, a 500 bed teaching hospital in the southern suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia. The Redesigning Care program is a hospital wide program applying Lean Thinking to processes throughout the institution from the Emergency Department through to the Central Sterile Supply Department. Hundreds of the hospital staff have now participated in a Lean Thinking training program or a Redesign project, and Redesign activities are becoming widespread in Australia. The challenges of implementing Activity Based Funding throughout the Australian Health system will undoubtedly provide further opportunity for system redesign.
David Ben-Tovim trained in Medicine and Psychiatry at the Middlesex and St Georges University Hospitals in London, and in Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, also in London. He moved to Australia in 1984, after a period of work in Botswana. He has acted as a consultant for the World Health Organisation on a number of occasions. He established the Clinical Epidemiology Unit at the Flinders Medical Centre in 1998, and was Director of Clinical Governance for the hospital prior to the launch of the Redesigning Care program in 2003. He has published extensively on a wide variety of topics in the peer reviewed literature, including papers on both Casemix and Clinical Process Redesign.
Megan Cumerlato
Dr Pieter Degeling
Over the past twenty five years Pieter has undertaken a large number of government and industry funded research and development projects within health care settings in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, The Netherlands, Slovenia, China and Vietnam, Laos, Philippines, Malaysia, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea. The bulk of this work has focused on the organisation change and development implications of efforts to establish more financially informed and outcomes-oriented approaches in the performance and management of service delivery systems. Pieter’s findings have been reported in academic publications and reports and helped to clarify:
- organisation design issues and clinical practice issues that have to be addressed if change initiatives on improving the quality, safety, efficiency, effectiveness and equity of service provision are to have any effect.
- how reform efforts are affected by the existing profession-based subcultures of hospitals and how resulting issues of clinician engagement might best be addressed;
- how reform efforts are affected by existing payment systems and how resulting issues might best be addressed:
- how the success of reform in both acute and primary care depends on the presence of structures and methods that authorise clinician managers to systematise clinical work performance. Central here are clinical pathways for high volume case types and the establishment (within each service organisation) of a pathway focused model of clinical governance.
Findings have also been incorporated into a number of developmental interventions.
Vera Dimitropoulos
Stephen Gillett
Steve is currently working in the Health Care group within KPMG’s Advisory Division. He is predominately working on projects relating to the national move to ABF and hospital performance.
Steve has a long background in collecting and using hospital data and has worked on the establishment of a number of key national data collections including the AIHW National Hospital Data collection, the National Health data Dictionary, the Hospital Casemix Protocol and the national Hospital Cost data Collection. Throughout the late 1980’s and the 1990’s he was involved in various capacities in the design of both AN-DRGs and AR-DRGs.
In the mid 1990’s Steve moved to Victoria to concentrate on the application of casemix within funding policy and was the senior technical specialist involved in setting Victoria’s acute inpatient funding model for several years.
Prior to joining KPMG, Steve was employed by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority where he provided technical direction for Hong Kong’s move to ABF and for the improvement of data quality.
Steve has also provided worked with the New Zealand District Health Boards, the Irish Ministry of Health and Children and specific health projects in Turkey, Kosovo and Lebanon.
A/Professor Terri Jackson
Terri’s major research interests focus on issues of technical efficiency in the provision of hospital-based care, and hospital funding approaches that use casemix adjustment. She undertook the first cost-weight study (1993) for the Victorian Department of Health’s casemix funding system. From 1998-2008 she served as a health economist on the Medical Services Advisory Committee, advising on economic aspects of the evaluation of non-pharmaceutical technologies. She has served on the executive of Patient Classification Systems/International and regularly teaches in their advanced training programs (Summer and Winter Schools).
Terri has recently returned to Australia from Canada where she was Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Alberta, researching the economics of in-patient safety. This work built on a series of studies she undertook for the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, using routinely collected hospital data to estimate the financial burden of different kinds of hospital-acquired complications. She now works part time at the Northern Clinical Research Centre of The Northern Hospital, stimulating and conducting research on patient safety and quality improvement. She holds adjunct academic appointments at the University of Melbourne, the University of Alberta, the University of Queensland and LaTrobe University.