Announcing fastABF

Distilling over 100+ pages of documented guidelines into an easy computation package for activity based funding.

Today we are releasing fastABF - a software package that helps healthcare IT teams easily compute activity based funding prices. It is available under both an open source license as well as a commercial license.

fastABF explained

At Greenlake Medical, we aim to improve revenue generation and management for hospitals across Australia and New Zealand. One metric that captures how revenue is measured and talked about is the National Weighted Activity Unit (NWAU) (also referred to as the Weighted Inlier Equivalent Separation WIES in some states). However the details of computing the NWAU/WIES for an episode of care is far from trivial.

• There are over a 100 pages of documentation and notes related to the steps involved in computing the price for the four major categories.
• The only reference implementations are in excel with scripts or SAS files which are not ideal for use on a system meant for production use where our security requirements mandate software codes that can be traced, audited, extended and tested.
• There are several criteria for computing adjustments to the NWAU which depend on factors ranging from the remoteness of a patient's address, to their age and other data points.

Hence we created a package (fastABF) to robustly deal with these issues.

Making fastABF available to all

If it were only the technical details above that were of concern, we would simply have taken the solution we developed, integrated it into our product and moved on to other tasks. However - we realised that IT staff at various hospitals are painstakingly testing, rewriting and maintaining the same sequence of steps.

This would take a typical healthcare IT team a month or so to create, debug and put in production.

Hence, it simply made sense for us to make this available to hospital IT staff via a strong open source license. Developers can now:

• save development significant time and go from start to computing an ABF test case within 5 minutes!
• Easily extend this to their own needs by starting from a well documented, scalable code base if they abide by the open source license terms.
• Reduce the potential for accidental bugs or flaws by leveraging an auditable code base.

On-cloud and proprietary use cases

We strongly encourage hospital IT staff to use and contribute to the free open source offering. However, for hospitals who wish to have a proprietary solution on the cloud or wish to create their own proprietary extensions, we offer commercial licenses that allow for enterprise grade cloud native deployments as well as on-premises solutions.