About the OSR
The Online Services Report (OSR) collects national data about organisations who receive funding from the Indigenous Australians’ Health Programme (IAHP) to deliver health services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These services include primary health care, maternal and child health care.
The OSR dataset focuses on the characteristics of these services, along with the activities and services they provide. It provides a basic measure of activity, volume and coverage of services.
Data it collects
Services submit aggregated organisation-level data on:
- staffing (both employed and visiting full-time equivalent staff)
- the types of health services provided (currently being revised with aim to implement in time for 1 July 2022 reporting period)
- the total number of individual clients seen
- client contacts
- episodes of care
- organisation governance, accreditation and information systems
- service gaps and challenges (currently being revised with aim to implement in time for 1 July 2022 reporting period).
Data it does not collect
The OSR dataset does not collect information on Indigenous health outcomes. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) publicly reports on health outcomes through regular:
- National Key Performance Indicators (nKPI) reports
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (HPF) reports.
Purpose
The data collected through the OSR helps us to identify:
- key issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health services
- services provided
- gaps in services provided
- continuous quality improvement processes of services funded under the IAHP.
Submission
We collect OSR data every July through the Health Data Portal. Wherever possible, services submit data through their clinical information systems. The portal pre-populates most OSR questions from the previous year’s responses. Services check these responses for accuracy and update if necessary.
Redesign
The AIHW reviewed the OSR data collection in 2019 or 2020, including extensive consultation with the Indigenous health sector. We further refined the Health Data Portal’s OSR capability based on the review’s recommendations and information gathered during portal co-design workshops. Key themes were to:
- reduce duplication and streamline the reporting wherever possible
- restructure and streamline the OSR into a small number of sections, with related items grouped together
- pre-populate items from the previous year’s report wherever possible
- make it easier for services to input workforce full-time equivalent information.
We are implementing the recommendations into the portal in 4 stages.
Stage 1 – 1 July 2019
We only included unchanged OSR questions in the Health Data Portal, not all the OSR questions.
Stage 2 – 1 July 2020
We included a small number of extra questions, along with new features:
- All AIHW data validation business rules automatically run and present rapid results to the health service.
- Healthcare Provider Identifier – Organisation numbers now appear in the Organisation Profile, along with some additional questions about the organisation’s board.
- A new section in the Site Profile requests confirmation of the name and address of any subsidiary clinics the organisation runs (information drawn from the health service profile in the portal). Extra information for each site is:
- site type
- days of operation
- whether it offers 24-hour emergency care.
- Users can show/hide updated data item definitions and examples contextually in the OSR.
- We also made a range of other enhancements and bug fixes.
Stage 3 – 1 July 2021
OSR will expand further as part of the third stage of development in time for the 2020–21 collection. Additional questions and functions include:
- updates to the Organisation Profile tab to include questions relating to accreditation, incorporation status, not-for-profit status, number of board members, board member training and board members' skills
- pre-population of sites tab with information provided in the 2019–20 OSR
- disaggregation of client numbers by age (5-year age groups) and gender as per OSR Deep Dive 28 May 2020 recommendations
- workforce Excel spreadsheet uploadable to automatically populate the current collection period’s workforce data.
Stage 4 – 1 July 2022
We have planned a fourth and final stage of OSR implementation. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Services Data Advisory Group (HS DAG) will consult with the sector about this. We expect it will include, where appropriate:
- further pre-population of questions that were introduced in stage 3
- details of the clinical services provided at each service delivery site
- questions on service gaps and challenges.
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