Ontario Case Costing Hospitals

Ontario is the most populous of Canada's ten provinces with approximately 39% of the Canadian population. Its residents are eligible for provincially funded health coverage. The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and CHIM Information Consulting Inc. (Canadian Health Information Management) jointly conducted a reabstraction study of 14,500 discharges from Ontario’s ten case-costing hospital corporations for the 2002–2003 and 2003–2004 fiscal years. The study aimed to evaluate the quality of coding of clinical and non-clinical information at these facilities, to assess the impact of any observed coding variation on measures of hospital output and resource utilization, to identify coding issues that arise as a result of the observed coding variation, and to discuss the findings related to the inter-rater reliability of the study’s reabstractors.