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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 2994 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Osborne asked where the money is coming from. If the buses were full all the time, then you could afford to offer much lower fares. We expect high usage of the buses during the Olympic period, allowing us to give a discounted fare. It is also appropriate as an encouragement on a special occasion like this, when we know that a large number of people are going to come from several sources to one point. Instead of getting caught up in a traffic jam, people should be able to get to the Olympic stadium as quickly and as easily as they can. The best way will be to take an ACTION bus.

MR RUGENDYKE: Mr Speaker, my question, through you, is to the Minister for Health and Community Care. Yesterday I asked the minister a question concerning the disputed hospital cross-border payment bills for New South Wales patients who are treated in our hospital. The minister advised that the disputes were presently the subject of a mediation process. We are waiting for further detail from the minister. It appears that the ACT will not receive all the money it is owed, and I expect that this will be a substantial amount. Minister, I understand that New South Wales use clinical costing systems called Transition and Trendstar that enable hospitals to cost individual services and to individualise bills. New South Wales would be able to accept the ACT's statement of costs if we used one of these clinical costing systems, because that would create common, consistent and comparable benchmarks. Does the ACT use either the Transition or Trendstar clinical costing systems?

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, the systems that a hospital uses as part of its costing processes determine a whole range of issues. The most important issue for us in our patient management system, which includes costing, is being able to identify a single patient identifier, which we usually refer to as the patient master index. That is the single most important factor we are working on, although it would be much easier if we were using one of those systems to provide information to New South Wales. There are other reasons why these decisions are made.

I do not believe your suggestion that we will not receive from New South Wales the full return from the work we do is true. We will make sure that we identify each cost-weighted separation or each average occasion of service we have provided, and that information will be put to New South Wales and we will be paid on that basis.

We are in the process of going through some of those cost-weighted separations manually. But we will do it to ensure that we get the money. In doing that, we will also double-check and see what our systems are and make sure that we can improve our systems. We are going through a constant process of improving our systems in both our public hospitals and in Community Care. The aim is still to get a patient master index, because we believe we can get improved patient care. Our highest priority is improved patient care.

MR RUGENDYKE: I ask a supplementary question. Can you confirm that the Canberra Hospital has had a copy of the Trendstar clinical costing system since 1993 and explain why it has not been put to use in the seven years since?

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