Performance Indicators for Coding Quality (PICQ) – Home Page

Performance Indicators for Coding Quality™(PICQ™) is a set of pre-determined indicators which identify records in data sets that may be incorrectly coded based on Australian Coding Standards (ACS) and coding conventions.

PICQ™:

• identifies data problem areas
• identifies specific records for possible correction
• measures data accuracy against a particular indicator or indicators.

PICQ™ is designed to examine admitted patient morbidity data coded using the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM) and the Australian Classification of Health Interventions (ACHI).
ICD-10-AM and ACHI are the national standard coding systems for admitted patient morbidity episodes in Australia and a number of other countries.

The Department of Health previously provided PICQ 2008 software to health services under a statewide licence agreement with the National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH) to allow hospitals to monitor coding quality for submission to the Victorian Admitted Episode Dataset (VAED). PICQ™ is now owned by Pavilion Health and the Department of Health has purchased an enterprise licence to provide PICQ™ v7.0 statewide benchmarking information to both public and private hospitals.

The licence agreement only allows the department to make individual hospital PICQ™ results available to public health services. However all public and private facilities will have access to statewide PICQ™ data via the Statewide PICQ Results page on this website.

Health services wishing to run PICQ™ in house must now purchase their own licence from Pavilion Health.

The department plans to commence the provision of individual 2011-12 PICQ™ reports to public health services in early 2012. Numerator reports will provide record level information on PICQ™ indicators to allow health services to review and correct coded data in order to improve overall coding accuracy and VAED data quality.

In 2012, the department will be providing periodic updates regarding health service PICQ™ performance across Victoria. These updates will include details and interpretation of PICQ™ indicators to allow health services to utilise their PICQ™ results to compare individual hospital performance to statewide results or to peer groups of Victorian health services.

All queries regarding the PICQ™ should be addressed to the HDSS Helpdesk on: HDSS.Helpdesk@health.vic.gov.au

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