Home <

2 The Move to Real-Time Reporting

Victorian health services are gradually making the transition to more efficient, automated and real-time reporting, in order to realise the benefits of reduced cost, time and effort in financial reporting. All health services have adapted their procedures and technology to support this transition. It is expected that all health services will have implemented the common chart of accounts by July 2007.

2.1 Health Collect, Agency Information Management System (AIMS) and the F1

The Agency Information Management System (AIMS) is a web based data entry system used by all public hospitals to report activity and finance data.   Activity data includes non-admitted activity data, average available beds information, energy consumption reporting and so on.

Finance data is reported through the monthly F1 return. Data is submitted via a web based excel spreadsheet, which must be downloaded from https://www.healthcollect.vic.gov.au/.

The first step is to obtain your agency’s userid and password, which are required to logon at the Health Collect portal for access to the AIMS website and the F1 return. Contact Ania Winczura at helpdesk@healthcollect.vic.gov.au or on 9096 8595.

For assistance with the completion of the F1 return, please contact your regional office (for regional base and rural hospitals) and respective account manager (for metropolitan health services). For assistance with submitting the F1 (technical assistance on AIMS related problems) please contact the AIMS Help Desk on (03) 9096 8595.

2.2 Manual and Other Electronic Submissions

The aim of DHS is to receive real time data from all Victorian health services. DHS recognises that health services will need some time to adapt. It is anticipated that all health services will be using the real time system by 1 December 2006.

For the other hospitals not using the common chart of accounts and cost centres, manual data entry is required for the entire F1 return.  This involves the download of the F1 form layout in an Excel workbook.